This starts out very much like a classic fantasy story: a disparate group of adventurers are thrown together on a swords-and-sorcery epic quest to save the world from an unspeakable evil.

But quite quickly you start to realise it's something more than that. The author is a huge AD&D fan and lots of the concepts from that start to appear in the book. After all, every decent D&D campaign also features a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and an archer.

The world seems loosely based on Celtic Scotland, and the story has the right combination of set battle pieces and world/character building to keep everything moving along nicely. The characters are varied and all have just enough human flaws and failings to be believable.

(Very very mild spoiler warning): There is a plot twist at the end of the story that I'm pretty sure you won't see coming until it comes up and wallops you with the force of Level 10 Cast Fireball spell. At which point you'll be sitting there dazed and amazed and flicking back through the book to look at all the little giveaway signs that you completely failed to notice the first time through!

Without a doubt this is one of my favourite classic-style fantasy books that I've read for quite some time.