Review: Well-written for a reasonably restricted audience
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 11, 2014
This book is a religious oriented fantasy of the swords and sorcery type, but it also has a small amount of medium-grade sexually explicit material, which is odd because an important audience, the religiously oriented, might be put off by that. It is clearly written, and the writing flows well. The plot is fairly basic, but because it is part 2 of a series, there are a number of references to the first book, which presumably explains how the situation at the start arose. C. D. Verhoff has given enough clues, however, that if you read this book first, it should be reasonably comprehensible. Thus it is "stand alone", but if you were to read both, the first should be read first.The concept is that Earth was subject to a number of catastrophes, with an end result that a number of humans in some sort of bunker were thrown into the distant future, where the inhabitants, in almost a reference to Doctor Moreau, seem to be half-human, half some sort of animal.  The humans create a settlement called Galatia, the various races form some sort of alliance that threatens Galatia, and a small squad of Galatians, and two others, set out to find half of "the Blood Map", which is some sort of magical artefact. One of them, Josie Albright, has another artefact that points in the direction.  The plot, therefore, is a quest in which the squad seeks out the map in order to save Galatia, and runs into a number of various adventures. In the centre of Galatia there is a large bottomless hole, called the mouth of God. Humans appear to have acquired magic (while the other races have attributes of the animal part) that is in two forms. The first is called charisma, and acts only mentally (as far as I could tell) and this is generally considered "good"; the other is the more normal magic, with spells, potions, fiery objects, curses, etc, and which is "bad", and, perforce, the wielders of it are bad. The religious part comes in later, and it is difficult to describe it without spoiling, but consider that if you do things that make little or no sense, but have faith, God will protect you with more divine magic. The question now is, as a reader, would you find this interesting? If so, the book is probably worth four stars, and that is the grading I give it, for the benefit of the reasonably restricted audience. If, however, you want your problems to be solved by character effort rather than some faith-based magic, I think you might be disappointed.