Harp is an ex-pirate with a massively scarred body, and the Captain and owner of the sailing ship known as "The Crane". He and his crew have been sent to Chult, a land primarily jungle, by the ruler of Tethyr, Queen Annais, to check on a colony Tethyr started there some months ago.
Harp has agreed mainly because the woman he most sincerely loved, the Elfmaid named Liel, traveled to Chult as part of the colony. Harp has a history with Liel, having rescued her from his former comrades, who were pirates, along with a lad named Kitto who served as the general dogsbody to the crew and their brutal captain. Harp raised a mutiny against the captain and fled with Liel and Kitto in a small boat. During their time together, he and Liel fell in love, but she was already enagaged to be married to a human man, the Champion of Tethyr, Cardew.
She left Harp when he gave her up and went with the man who was to be her husband, but Harp pled guilty to mutiny and was sent to prison, where he was tortured by the brutal commander, a mage who chopped his body to pieces with magic, a bit at a time, before bringing him back together.
Harp realizes he was wrong to give up Liel, and hopes to make it up to her, but soon the whole story of a "colony" unravels. The jungle is filled with the remains of vast cities, and ruins dot the landscape. But this is no place for the unwary: animals grown to giant size pose a very real hazard, and Yuan-Ti call the place their home.
Something else strange is going on, as Harp and his crew discover a very strange Liel trying to destroy a strange machine left behind in the ruins. Though she remembers Harp and her Husband Carew, at times she seems strangely passionless and as if she is reciting her answers to questions by rote. With the help of some Jungle Dwarves, Harp discovers that the woman is not really Liel, but a copy with some of her memories made by her husband in the machine she was destroying.
The dwarves know of a strange magic that Carew is seeking to find in the jungle, and it is too dangerous to let him find it. Even as their Shaman finally heals Harp's body completely, and they discover the real Liel, they realize that Carew and his backer, the same mage who tortured Harp in prison, want the magic for their own, and because so many of the crew have a grudge against Carew, they determine to keep him from having it. But one of their group has been exhibiting strange magic, and his father dabbled in forbidden magic. Can they trust him to use his magic on their behalf or will the tides of evil within him pull him away from the group?
This book took me quite a while to get into, and it didn't really come together for me until almost 3/4 of the way through. Up until that point, I found myself reading very unenthusiastically. But after a certain point, the disparate plot threads finally came together and added to the greater whole, and I found some enthusiasm for the story.
But on the whole, I found the book rather... dull at best. The characters, while given backgrounds that seem to make them interesting, just didn't grab me in any sort of visceral way, and they actually felt rather bland. It may have helped that towards the end, we found out much more about them, to the point where they became interesting.
On the whole, this book was only okay, bordering on boring. The good ending didn't make up for the slog through a good chunk of the book, and I'd have to think about getting a book by this author again.
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