Bad Blood is the sequel to Stan Nicholl’s Orcs: First Blood trilogy, which I reviewed last year.
Nicholls supplies the reader with a quick recap, so it’s very probable one could read Bad Blood without having first read First Blood.
Bad Blood begins with Stryke and the warband (the Wolverines) happily living in their homeland, answering to no master. Stryke, while happily settled with two hatchlings, hungers for the old days, where bloodlust and adventure were common happenstance. When Stryke gets a mysterious message from Serapheim, a powerful magician, that Jennesta, the Wolverine’s old mistress (read: Evil Overlord) may still be alive and subjugating Orcs in another world, he immediately rounds up the Wolverines for a revenge mission.
Stryke and the band enter another world where Orcs are little more than slaves and their bloodthirsty nature devolved so much it can only be called meek–but a small Resistance tries to keep the humans from gaining total control. For the Wolverines, the ill treatment of Orcs in this world is more than enough to ensure their aid, but when they hear Jennesta may be at the heart of the Orcs’ livestock-like status, they commit to assassination–and knowing Jennesta, very possibly suicide. The book flows at a fairly good pace, and the action simply unfolds.
Unfortunately, right when things really start getting good the book ends, which is the way I suppose it goes with trilogies. Nicholls rips out the still-beating heart of traditional fantasy and puts in its place something less than human. I only wish I had the next book to jump right into!
