Soldiers Of Ice: A Book Review

I finished this latest book on Monday at work, so on with the customary review. Soldiers of Ice is a Forgotten Realms novel by David Cook. It is the seventh book in the Harpers series, each volume of which details an agent, or agents of this semi-secret organisation for good. This book details a rookie Harper agent by the name of Martine of Sembia (Sembia being a large, very wealthy nation, ruled by merchant houses).

Martine is a woman eager to prove herself, and thoroughly fed up of being a mere messenger for the organisation she has joined, so she leaps at the chance of a solo mission, to the frozen north. There she is informed by her mentor, the wizard Jazrac, that she must place a set of enchanted stones around a planar rift, to seal it and then bring the keystone back, so that he can finish the enchantment and seal the gateway between worlds. Easy she thinks... boy is she wrong!

It is easy to emphasise with her, I mean who hasn't been in a position when you are finally given a chance to prove what you can do and you go at it hammer and tongs, determined to give 110 percent, and mess it up somehow? She seals the rift, but that quickly proves to be the easy part. Far harder is dealing with the creature that got through it, before it was closed, an Ice Devil by the name of Vreesar, who is infuriated to find himself trapped on her world.

The book is very well written, with a tight, engaging plotline, all set in one tiny wintry valley, far from the rest of the world. Martine isn't alone, she finds an ally in a retired ex-paladin named Vilheim and also the small clan of gnomes (the Vani) who live in the southern half of the valley, though they are resentlful allies, and initially furious that her actions in cosing the rift have left the dangerous Vreesar trapped in their valley. As for the devil, it takes control of a tribe of gnolls (7' tall hyena men) and leads them to war against the gnomes, wanting the keystone that Martine has, so it can reopen the rift and bring more of its kind to the world to conquer it.

She also find an unlikely alley in the form of Krote, a gnoll shaman, who wants to learn the secrets of the southern lands (like reading and writing!) from her, and who becomes outcast from his tribe when Vreesar easily massacres the old chieftain and takes command of them. The battles are crisp and exciting to read, and the author does a good job of portraying a conflict in a place where nature itself is against both sides, the cold sapping everyones strength, apart of course from Vreesar, who proves to be a very compelling and alien villain.

I first read this bookwhen it came out back in 1993, but with no money right now to buy any new novels, I am re-reading my small library of novels, refreshing these stories in my mind. This one gets a solid 4/5, only dropping a point due to the cliche ending, which didn't satisfy me as a worthy finale to an otherwise great story.