Jarlaxle, Artemis and friends on an adventure.

Great chance to see Artemis and Jarlaxle together, great dynamic between the two. Great cast of friends and foes.

3 people found this helpful

Awesome

easily the greatest book series of all the time the fact that everyone doesn't know about this is such a shame!

2 people found this helpful

Deeper look at the assassins soul

Just listen to it - I’ve been quite glad to dig into this alternative story. Love and adventures

2 people found this helpful

they changed the narrator!!!

I absolutely love these books, I have read the whole Drizzit series and decided to listen to them to get a new perspective on these books. That being said, changing the narrator 16 books in is booty!! And it's only this book! the next one Victor Bevine is narrating! I dont really like Male narrators but I find I absolutely love Victor Bevine. I'm just gonna tough this one out but just know that I am not happy about it.

5 people found this helpful

I hate how he says "short-lived".

the book was really great, I was only slightly annoyed with the pronunciation of short-lived.

1 person found this helpful

Not quite Crystal shard but still pretty solid

Entreri is stlll an Edge boi and I love him for it. Jarlaxle remains the best thing this series ever created.

Love this Duo!

Great book. Loved the adventure and the interaction of the two main characters. Highly recommended!

Grand adventure, Grating insanity-inducing pronunciation

Victor Bevine has contrived several defining voices for key characters that perfectly fit their personalities. Artemis Entreri, Jarlaxle Baenre, Athrogate are all done masterfully and sound exactly as you would expect them to.

My one critical complaint, which I’m sure has been stated by many others on every Forgotten Realms title that has been narrated by this individual, is the way he consistently pronounces certain common words. I mean in just the most wrong, and before listening to these audiobooks, never before experienced ways. We are not talking po-tay-to / po-tah-to here folks…..

The biggest and most prominent offender here being how he pronounces outlived as outLIVEd, as in a “live concert”. Which made me want to eat glass by the 30th time I heard it. After awhile you start gravitating towards this unique take on the English language.

He has done that with “outlived” since book one of the Drizzt saga, nothing new…. The new and oft-maligned word that Salvatore first uses in this novel, which appears many times within it, is timbre.

Rather than pronounce it correctly, like timber (tim-bur), he says TAM-bruh. Again, points for creativeness, but not many points because it becomes incredibly irksome and draws away from the story…I began wondering if narrators have editors who proof-listen to these audio files before release. Why has no one corrected this? There are so many comments on every book concerning these things and how annoying and jarringly distractedly Audible users, who paid for the title, find this.

But then after 150+ hours of audio when you’re this far in Drizzt series and still hearing this happen… you will start to wonder. You will become obsessed. You may just go a little mad…

….becoming all-consumed by thoughts of this. You will begin theorycrafting, wondering: how has he not received hundreds of letters, emails, and even just consistent corrections from others in daily life. Is this some sort of punk-rock grammatical-rebel/genius bucking the system. Is he going to take down Websters, MacMillan, Wikipedia and every other source that cannot, and will NOT, tell this man how a word should sound?! Am I a corporate sellout who cannot see the noble cause Mr. Bevine has selflessly put himself forward to crusade for, changing how words sound one audiobook at a time?

…Or maybe artistic pronunciations are for slam poetry. Can we just get our audiobook narrators to conform to standard English, as the author intended in this case? That would be lovely.

Overall: 5
Performance: 5 (-2 points for taking me down a rabbit hole and inciting my rant about pronunciation)
Story:5

loved it

this book was so good. was not sure how I felt about focusing on the "bad guys" but I absolutely loved this one. now I'm off to the 3rd book of this series.

Enchanted castles created by artifacts

Promise of the Witch-King is the second book in the Forgotten Realms: The Sellswords sub-series of R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt series. Like the immediately preceding book, Servant of the Shard it happens without any interference from Drizzt himself. This one doesn’t even include Drizzt’s usual philosophical commentary at the beginning or between sections. I’m not sure whether I’m sorry that Drizzt doesn’t show up in this one or not. The book is pretty good without him. But I bet Drizzt and his companions are off somewhere on the other side of Faerun wondering how to act without any interference from Jarlaxle and Artemis Entreri.

Who I do miss in this book is the evil little crystal shard, Crenshininbon. Artemis and Jarlaxle destroyed the sentient shard with help from the priest, Cadderly and his family and friends, and a dragon in the previous book.

Now, the mercenary Dark Elf and the assassin are working for a pair of dragon sisters. They are out collecting treasure for the sisters to add to their hordes. And they like magical artifacts as much as gold and jewels. So, they have Artemis and Jarlaxle hunting for items left by the powerful wizard Zhengyi, who was blown to bits years earlier.

And what’s the first thing the pair encounter? An enchanted castle created by a magical spellbook stuffed absolutely full of weapons, traps, enchanted warriors, and other magical defenses. With all the magic the pair of them possess, they barely manage to survive the thing. Destroying it and the creature (they call it a lich; a lich appears to be a super powerful wizard who wants to be in control of everything and is practically unkillable) that powers it appears to be almost an accident. Jarlaxle is happy because he finds a magical skull gem (that he doesn’t give to the dragon sisters), but Artemis is angry because the magic-eating glove that goes with his magical sword, Charon’s Claw, is lost in the fight.

The dragons are so pleased that they send the two soldiers of fortune out to find more of Zhengyi’s artifacts.

The two have hardly begun to explore the Bloodstone Lands where they wind up looking for these artifacts before they get tangled up with another castle-creating spellbook, this one even more vicious than the last one. They need the help of a larger company to sort out this one, so it’s a good thing they are in the middle of a company going to do just that.

For those who like fight scenes, or who like a book that could be a game of Dungeons and Dragons, you will love this book. Artemis and Jarlaxle aren’t troubled greatly by consciences, so they don’t hold back much in their fighting. Surprisingly, neither do most of the other members of the band they are fighting with. We find out some pretty amazing things about some of their fellow fighters before the spellbook and the lich behind this second castle are vanquished.

My favorite characters are the half-orc sorceress Arayan (?) and her half-orc friend, Olgercon (?). Arayan first brings the castle to life when she starts to read the spellbook after her uncle brings it to her, and it feeds off her life energy, rendering her virtually useless for most of the book. The uncle binds Olgercon to her to strengthen her, making him promise to kill her before the book overpowers her completely, but mostly Olgercon is drained and pretty useless most of the time too. So we don’t get to see enough of them. Several other members of the party are convinced that Arayan is the power source behind the castle and are all for killing her right away. But Arayan and Olgercon are almost the only nice people in the party. Some of the others make Artemis and Jarlaxle look like good guys in comparison.

Victor Bevine did the narration for this book, but he almost didn’t sound like Victor Bevine. I presume this was because I have come to associate his narration with Drizzt’s character. Most of the characters he is voicing in this book tend to have more growly voices, so it didn’t sound the same.