The Blood King (Chronicles of the Necromancer #2) by Gail Z. Martin

Mass Market Paperback, 615 pages

Published January 29th 2008 by Solaris

ISBN 1844165310 (ISBN13: 9781844165315)

Source: Purchased from Amazon.com

The Blurb (www.goodreads.com)

The second installment of the Chronicles of the Necromancer. Having escaped being murdered by his evil brother, Jared, Tris must take control of his magical abilities to summon the dead, and gather an army big enough to claim back the throne of his dead father. But it isn't merely Jared that Tris must combat. The dark mage, Foor Arontala, has schemes to raise the Obsidian King...

The end of The Summoner pretty much left us standing in a crowded room, everything having come together, with no idea what to do next. It wasn't exactly a cliffhanger, but it sure left me wanting more. So of course I immediately started on this The Blood King.

The novel begins with a lot of training and planning. We have Tris/Carina training with the Sisterhood. We have Jonmarc Vahanian training Carroway and Kiara in fighting. We have Sarterious and the Vayesh Maru planning how to invade Margolan.

Then, after all the training and planning, everyone splits in to 2 groups, with one group going to wage guerilla warfare in Margolan, and one group simply traveling toward the palace.

The book was long, and not a whole lot happened, to be honest. I love the characters, and I was pleased with the outcome. Typical ending, the good guy wins and the bad guy loses after the bad guy screws up monologuing. But that's not really a spoiler because we all know that's how a book like this is going to win. Honestly, if it was about 200 pages shorter, it would have been a lot more enjoyable I think. There seemed to be a lot of rambling, like the author just couldn't figure out how to get where she wanted to go.

There were some good scenes, even so. The fight in the Sisterhood when Tris began his training. Sarterious discovering the berserker fighters. But all in all, I was a little bit disappointed. I'm still starting the third book though, so we shall see if it gets better.