In Stormrider David Gemmell yet again demonstrates the passion for storytelling and the heroic which makes his best books so very much better than his sometimes clunky individual sentences might indicate.
Driven back to the barren hills of their homeland, the Rigante clansmen whose ancient ways have dominated Gemmell's series named for them are the natural world's last resource against crusaders, whose corrupt magic would destroy everything. Yet the crucial hero of the struggle is not the Rigante chieftain Kaelin, but Gaise, the dashing cavalryman son of the Rigante's worst enemy, the Moidart.

Gemmell is fascinated by what makes good men do evil--Gaise becomes hideously ruthless in his pursuit of a righteous war--and also by what makes evil men do good; faced with an ultimate evil that regards him as a personal enemy, the Moidart is forced not only onto the side of Good, but also to an understanding of what he really wants.

Gemmell is fond of the brutal and of the sentimental, but there is an underlying integrity to his work that comes from a real belief in the importance of what he is saying; his work is sometimes ponderous and pretentious, but never trivial. --Roz Kaveney