The Shield of Thunder is the follow up to Lord of the Silver Bow and just as good. It takes a about 200 pages before we are reintroduced to the characters of Lord of the Silver Bow, but this works out amazingly well. Gemmell takes his time introducing runaway priestess Piria and two renegade Mycene warriors: Kalliades and Banokles. Especially these two Mycene are characters you can't help but grow to love. Banokles even provides a little comic relief in a book that has it's fair share of battles and bloodshed. These new characters are so well done that we don't even have to miss the ones we got to know in the first book. Later in the book the storylines interweve and we get a perfect set up for the third book: Fall of Kings.

We are also introduced to other new characters. Most notably Achilles, the legendary hero of Thessaly, who burns to show his skills of war against Hektor, Prince of Troy. His first confrontation with Hektor makes for one of the interesting moments in the novel.

History fanatics who can't stand authors who take 'liberties' with events as they supposedly took place, will probably not appreciate this book. Gemmell remixed Homer's tale and made it more of an alternate history than a realistic retelling of the original legend. But that doesn't make it any worse - in fact it reads like a blockbuster movie. For some this may be a reason to dislike the book and the complete trilogy; for me it was a reason to love it.

8,5 / 10

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This is a good example of a sequel. It continues the first novel and builds up to the third book of the trilogy. ( )

A great continuation of the saga of heroes on the great green. While well written and extremely injoyable, I believe this is the weakest in the trilogy. That being said, a weak novel for David Gemmell could still pummel any other novel in the genre. ( )

He has done it to me again. I planned to polish this one off quickly, but no such luck. He soon sucked me into it at length each time I picked it up.

The decisions of all the leaders of the region are being made, and alliances formed of necessity, but most of the book focuses on characters other than Priam and Agamemnon.

Odysseus does feature, though, as he is the key figure, with his change from neutral status after Helikaon's delirious revelation to Prima.

Kalliades and Banokles again share page time.

The last third of the book jumps into the beginnings of the war in earnest, and perhaps is a little less interesting than the rest.

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