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Saturday, 30 June 2012

BOOK REVIEW: The Legend of Deathwalker (David Gemmell)


Book: The Legend of Deathwalker

Author: David Gemmell

Rating: 8.5/10


A story from the past of Druss the Legend, One of Gemmell's best characters.

In this story it starts with Druss on the walls of Dros Delnoch speaking to a fellow soldier facing Ulric and his Nadir horde( the setting of another book) and he starts telling the story of this book and thus the main story begins....
Druss is competing in a game of nations in Gulgothir as the Drenai wrestler after injuring the real one in a practise fight, he is his usual
un-defeatable self and against the odds makes it to the final. Now he is against the Gothir fighter Klay and it is set to be a contest of giants,
There's just one set back; The mad king of the Gothir has decreed that Druss will lose in a "prophecy" and if he wins it could be seen as a Drenai attempt to destabilise the Gothir nation.

Or so the Drenai diplomats tell him.

However the people behind the mad-king on the throne need to make sure that Druss loses and send armed fighters to injure or kill him outside a bar.

This plan backfires drastically when Klay witnesses the attack and gets involved to save Druss, and is badly wounded.

When news of this reaches the public all bets on the fight are cancelled and riots break out all over the city,


In the following chaos Druss learns of healing stones said to be hidden in the lands of the Nadir, only these will restore Klay, if they exist.


So Druss and his friend Sieben the poet travel to the shrine of the father of the Nadir to find the stones, but when he arrives he finds himself entangled in a battle between a few hundred nadir and a few thousand Gothir warriors trying to crush their sacred site.

and while the battle rages Druss must walk the land of Death to save spirits trapped by demons, If he wants to find the jewels on top of fighting a Gothir army that outnumbers them 100-1

Can Druss succeed?
and find out how he gets his nadir name, read it.


The twist with the combat and magic in Hell is also nice, but I don't want to spoil that for you...






I can't get enough of David Gemmell and his various books set in the same medieval land.
  This is yet another brilliant one, It's a good stand alone story but I think it would be better If you also read Legend, but either order would work, they're both about Druss.
If you haven't started reading Gemmell yet your missing out big time ! check out my other reviews of his books and then get them and read them :)

Hope you found this review helpful, (and sorry I haven't posted in a while and  if it's a little short and light on the details than usual,)
The Devonian Book Reviewer

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