Begins as the story of a young man named Drake who is thrown into the sea by the allegedly merciful King Tor. It goes on to include Drake's vengeance upon the king and sundry other adventures (in company with appropriate others) on land, sea, and in realms not of Earth. This is the kind of large-scale fantasizing that has made David Edding justly well known, and Cook indulges an Eddings-like penchant for drawing basic plot elements from the conventional fantasy repertoire and then reworking them so effectively that they make for compelling reading. Cook brings to his particular fantasizing a distinctly offbeat sense of the ridiculous, too. The results he produces should please a wide range of fantasy readers. and " and " - Booklist.