i enjoy the adventures of Bertan Wandor, an assassin. The treatment of magic is well handled in this series. is he "the Hero Returned?" ( )

Roland Green wrote this as a much younger writer than he matured into. The book reads very much like Paolini's Eragon. We have an infallible hero who has problems that really are not problems since everything thrown the way of the hero is simply and easily overcome.

We have villians who have no restrictions in the sense of time, where one page they can do something that would take weeks to do, in minutes, and then other things that would take minutes take weeks. After sometime you start skimming since you don't want to invest much into a book that the suspension of disbelief can't take place. And there is where our problems start truly.

In order to accept fantasy, you have to suspend your disbelief. Magic, and a world that is not our own takes some leap of faith. In those first pages, perhaps you will succeed, a pursued horseman has to part from his ride as it dies from exhaustion, but then noting that there are more pursuers then he could overcome, he heads to the forbidden hills.

Wandor of course survives what everyone else would never survive. He not only survives butis chosen of fate. He is not only chosen of fate here, but the reason he was pursued shows that he was chosen of fate by the land he lived in also. Then the land he goes to save, their heriditary boogie men also have Wandor as the chosen of fate too. How many times is he a savior?

Then we have the King and his son-in-law. The King knows the son-in-law is trying to get rid of him, his nobles know it, and his people know it. So we all know it. But here late in the game of manuevering, when the king is vastly outnumbered by those who would serve him, all hopes are going to be put on Wandor's shoulders.

When younger and writing plots such as this, it probably appeals to the teenage reader of Heroic Fantasy, and could indeed be plotted by a mind very close in age to that. Green got much better, The Great King's War is just one example, but Wandor falls short and certainly is never worth a reread. ( )