“It’s as if Niles needed some sort of generically evil Dark Lord for his plot, so he scanned through the long list of Realms deities, saw a god of murder, and thought “Yeah, that sounds evil. He’ll do!” without actually thinking it through.”

“The worst fault of this plot, though, is that just about every major problem in the book is resolved by some manner of deus ex machina rather than action on the protagonists’ part. Who knew that divine intervention could become so… boring?”

“Competent, not terrible, but not doing anything that would distinguish it from any of the other million fantasy novels out there where a whitebread prince gets a girl, finds a magic sword, and defeats a great evil according to a prophecy. In short, it feels like paint-by-numbers fantasy.”