Skeleton in the Closet

A Dragon Business Adventure

By: Kevin J. Anderson

Narrated by: Kevin J. Anderson

The Princess Bride meets Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels.

Join former scamp Cullin and his merry band of confidence men (and one liberated princess) as they put The Sting in the Middle Ages. With dreams of being a hero, or at least a storyteller, Cullin travels with Sir Dalbry, a washed-up knight in shining armor; Reeger, ready and eager for any part of the dirty work; and Affonyl, former princess, who wanted to study science and alchemy, rather than embroidery.

Together, they cross the land with one scam after another, concocting their own heroic deeds, preparing mock dragon heads, or selling kraken tusks and mermaid scales.

But when attempting to con King Longjohn, whose castle is supposedly bursting at the seams with treasure, the caper turns sour. The powerful Wizard-Mage Ugnarok and his army of ugly and muscular (if not-too-bright) orcs takes over Longjohn’s castle, imprisoning the king, pillaging the halls, and carrying on with typical orc-like mayhem.

Cullin and his friends are trapped in the castle’s labyrinth of secret passages, just trying to survive...or is this the opportunity for a grander scam than they have ever attempted before?

Orcs are terribly superstitious—you can’t bash a ghost, after all—and it’s like Die Hard in a castle, as Cullin, Affonyl, Reeger, and Dalbry set up a grand haunting that will scare off even the scariest orc army.

©2023 WordFire Press LLC (P)2023 WordFire Press LLC

Kind of a let down

After how much I enjoyed The Dragon Business, I'm honestly disappointed in this whole production. The best way I can describe it is that this book feels more like a fanfiction of the first book than a proper sequel. The characters have been boiled down to their most basic tropes, rendering them pretty much two dimensional, with all of the character growth from the first book gone. The humor feels forced, and what might have been a fun joke when it's first said grows tiresome and annoying as it gets repeated ad nauseum from then on out. Not helping anything is the fact that there's a different narrator this time around, going from a professional voice actor to the author himself, meaning the characters all sound different than you're used to, and that many of them end up sounding the same. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely lost in the shadow of the original.