I picked this up some time ago, while browsing in Reader's Feast for someone else's birthday present. The premise in the blurb intrigued me - inverting the traditional roles of Orcs as savage aggressors, and humans as victims: Stryke, Captain lf the legendary Orc Warband the Wolverines, though that he had lef them to safety in a realm far from Maras-Mantia. A santucary fom the cruelty of man. But hen a message reaches him. A message from his past. A message of terrible foreboding for Orbs everywhere...  When I picked it up, I'd never head of Nicholls, and had no idea that this was actually the first book of a sequel-trilogy to the Orcs: First Blood trilogy. Probably the kicker "the orcs are back!" should have clued me in, but it didn't - it actually wasn't until I went looking on amazon (where I swiped the cover image, right) that I discovered the previous series. And  that explained a lot.

The book opens with what seems like a chapter, but is actually a prologue-recap of the previous trilogy. It's a straight-up tell of "here is history you should know", but delves into so much detail and such extent - it's clearly telling the whole story of the previous books, not just the cliff notes - that it gets quite disconcerting. I remember thinking at the time (not knowing of the previous books, remember) "Well, if you planned this all out that well, why didn't you write that book?" Ahuh. That story seemed far more interesting than the one I'd gathered from the blurb, and I was rather disappointed that the author seemed to have written the wrong one.

With some trepidation, I began the second chapter, and discovered with relief that Nicholls was not intending to deliver the entire story in that "here is the plot" style. His prose has character, his characters are servicable, and his descriptions of the worlds vivid enough to see by.

Unfortunately, the only thing 'fresh' in this book is the inversion I mentioned above. The characters don't feel cut-out, but there's little life in them - there's no feeling of internal movements making them tick. They feel more like functions of the plot, there to move the story along and have appropriate emotional responses to the right stimulii. I couldn't connect with any of them. The humour is amusing for about four pages, then quickly grows stale and tired. While it didn't actually make for a bad book, it didn't put up much of a fight when I had to go teach a class.

I wonder at the decision to include that prologue. The information wasn't strictly necessary - a lot of it is recapped through the book in-story - and it serves a major purpose that I don't think Nicholls considered. There's a glaring discrepancy of quality between the story in the prologue, and the story we're reading. Quite simply - there isn't much story we're reading. There are a series of loosely-connected and overly-described battles, some planning, some mistrust between various characters and orcs, some moments of character development that you pegged the moment the character first walked in, and some exposition. Toss with a dash of swearing, the occasional painful sentence or dialogue. Serves one.

From the sound of it, the earlier books were much more involved, and much more interesting. I'd suggest giving this one a miss- stick to the originals.