Review: Mark of Damnation - James Wallis

Title Mark Of Damnation

Author James Wallis

Pages 287

Year 2003
Reading Time 5 days (June 2010)

Rating 8.5 out of 10

This is a great book. I do not understand why he only wrote two books for Black Library. So far this one was a great novel with good characters. We get war, espionage, history and plenty more. It good. The second book is called Mark Of Heresy and it was the last book. Amazon says there is a third called Mark of Mutation but the book was never published. If the second book is as good as this one I can't understant why.

In this book we have only one main character called Karl Hoche first a army officer then joined the ranks of Untersuchung - a clandestine group dedicated to fighting the dark forces of Chaos in all of it's guises.

In this book we to know more of the Reiksguard and how the military works. Not only the Reiksguard but also the Witch Hunters.. It is quite good. In this book no character is what it supposes to be. It begins with one thing then another. It's quite good even if a little difficult to know who's who and who's helping who or what. The travels of Hoche begins in the army camp and after discover that some Knight Panthers are Khorne worshipers, he goes to Aldorft where the Knight Panthers tries to kill him. Then the Untersuchung recruits him and he goes throught training which is quite good and probably one of the best parts of the novel. Then he goes in his first mission to Marienburg and then he travels back to Aldorft where he learns of the fate of his organization by the hands of witch hunters. He is captured and tortuted but with the help of a female spy of the Untersuchung he escapes and goes into the wild because he has a mutation of a mouth growing on his neck/shoulder. He mets some other mutatns and live with them. This is probably the best part with the training. Here we see him change from a god-fearing man of Sigmar to a disbeliever and trying to embrace and then fight chaos. In the end he gets yet again to the camp where is a plot to sacrifice an army to Khorne.... The fighting was quite good.

This book is not easy to read as everyone changes and changes and you get confuse with all changes. It's quite good but you must read it carefully. I think if this book had 400 pages instead of 287 it would be even better..