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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Character-Assassination... in every sense.,
By Silver Whistle (Scotland, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Kings of Vain Intent (Mass Market Paperback)
The sequel to 'Knights of Dark Renown' would probably be an exciting enough read, provided you don't know anything of the real history and characters depicted. Unfortunately, if you do, it rapidly moves from the irritating to the downright offensive, especially with regard to Shelby's grotesque depiction of Conrad of Montferrat, here depicted as a vampiric-looking, twisted sadist who tortures his wife. (The US edition of the novel adds an extra chapter, not in the UK edition, to accommodate an explicit flogging and rape.) It's bad enough that the poor man was assassinated physically; Shelby's character-assassination of him (for which there is no historical evidence) is gratuitous sensationalism. As a long-term researcher of the character, it was obvious to me that Shelby hadn't read the detailed Italian or German works on him, and had just created a 2-D 'Wicked Sir Jasper' melodrama villain and stuck his name on to it. A pity, since the real man would have made a splendid dashing, tragic hero... Shelby's treatment of him is just a sickening travesty, and left me disgusted with the whole book, although I had enjoyed its predecessor well enough.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Character-Assassination... in every sense.,
By Silver Whistle (Scotland, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The kings of vain intent (Hardcover)
Character-assassination... in every sense, 1 Feb 2006 The sequel to 'Knights of Dark Renown' would probably be an exciting enough read, provided you don't know anything of the real history and characters depicted. Unfortunately, if you do, it rapidly moves from the irritating to the downright offensive, especially with regard to Shelby's grotesque depiction of Conrad of Montferrat, here depicted as a vampiric-looking, twisted sadist who tortures his wife. (The US edition of the novel adds an extra chapter, not in the UK edition, to accommodate an explicit flogging and rape.) It's bad enough that the poor man was assassinated physically; Shelby's character-assassination of him (for which there is no historical evidence) is gratuitous sensationalism. As a long-term researcher of the character, it was obvious to me that Shelby hadn't read the detailed Italian or German works on him, and had just created a 2-D 'Wicked Sir Jasper' melodrama villain and stuck his name on to it. A pity, since the real man would have made a splendid dashing, tragic hero... Shelby's treatment of him is just a sickening travesty, and left me disgusted with the whole book, although I had enjoyed its predecessor well enough.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointing follow up to Knights of Dark Renown,
By
This review is from: The kings of vain intent (Hardcover)
This book takes up where the Knights of Dark Renown left off. Saladin has won his battles, and the Moslems now control Palestine. The Christian leaders are Saladin's prisoners, and their castles and the holy city of Jerusalem are in Saracan hands. But a new star is on the horizon, heading with steady implacability towards Palestine: Richard the Lion-Hearted. Will he be able to free Palestine from Moslem hands and return it to Christian control?
This lackluster offering follows the events of the Third Crusade, but unlike its predecessor, the characters are wooden, often one-dimensional portrays that could have been cut directly out of 10th-grade history texts and pasted onto these pages. Shelby appears to not know what to do with the newly-freed Christian leaders before Richard arrives, and once the Lion-Hearted appears all other personages fade into the background. Humphrey and Isabella suffer horribly throughout this entire book, yet the reader feels little connection or sympathy to them: somehow it all seems impossibly fake. By the end of the book one feels the worst of all feelings: relief. Hard to believe that the two books were written by the same person. It took me years to find this sequel, and frankly, it wasn't worth the effort. Just get the Knights of Dark Renown and skip the follow up: you won't be missing anything you didn't know from history....
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