I’ve a lot of Tom Holt on my shelf, he’s an author I enjoy quite a bit but I didn’t feel the love with this book. It was quite a shock to be halfway through before I found any type of connection, I only persevered as it’s Holt and I kept remembering all the other books which took such a time to get to the point. Essentially I was hanging out to find the good bits, to make a connection.

There are some of the usual connections that Holt makes. How he brings Norse Gods into every day life, how he works marketing agents into the story as well as Attila the Hun and Joan of Arc and at the end of the book has a story that actually makes sense. I’m not saying the book doesn’t hang together, just that I didn’t find the connection until the second half.

Holt is one of those authors who take many ideas which have absolutely no relation to each other and eventually joins them together to have some sort of relationship. In that respect he has some similarity to Robert Asprin and Terry Pratchett. He’s not in Pratchett’s league, I suspect very few people are.

Just as an example of some of the things I like about this book, I have to give you something. ‘Thou shalt not bounce the Lord thy God off the walls like a squash ball.‘ This is followed up by the character bouncing the God off the walls. Why do I like this? It’s irreverent, it shows how much the character is sick of being pushing around, so sick of it that he’s prepared to do the opposite of what normal folks would do, and most of all it takes me back to my childhood to when we’d make up our own 11th Commandment.