Relic hunting is a dangerous business. Recover the wrong artifact, and you place your entire world in peril. "So well written and captivating that I didn’t want to put the books down. Expertly crafted and a joy to read." - ★★★★★ Review
A misfit crew of relic hunters set off on a series of action-packed quests. Their Locate and recover long-lost magical artifacts to use in the battle against the Dark Lord. Unwittingly, their actions send their world hurtling toward a dire fate.
If you enjoy fast-paced questing stories, witty banter, and the discovery of magical artifacts, you'll love this series featuring the world's premier team of relic seekers, set in the bestselling world of Wizardoms.
Meet the
Tor Ranseur - Armed with enchanted weapons, this retired soldier leads his crew in search of magical artifacts that might tip the scales in the battle against the forces of darkness. His expertise on ancient history, skill in disarming traps, and ability to solve puzzles make him ideal for this role.
Koji - After more than a decade together as Murguard Soldiers, Koji is Tor's most trusted friend. Although seven feet tall and as strong as an ox, he has a kind heart. Koji wears an enchanted gauntlet that replaced a hand lost in battle and wields a razor sharp hatchet.
Borgli - Exiled from his people, Borgli is a dwarf trapped in a human world. This fierce warrior wields an ancient, legendary hammer, and he possesses the innate ability to shape stone with his bare hands. Gruff at one moment, joking and brash the next, Borgli brings spirit and comical moments to his team.
Quell - As the youngest and only female member, Quell rounds out the crew and provides balance. Raised by a master ranger, she is a skilled archer, tracker, and hunter, offering skills that the other team members lack. Her snark and sarcasm add to the group dynamic.
Be it your first Wizardoms novel or your 16th, you don't want to miss this all new, thrilling adventure! Join Tor's bantering crew on an action-packed quest peppered with laugh out loud moments._________________________________
This ~900 page epic fantasy bundle includes books averaging 4.5+ stars across ~1,000 Amazon reader reviews. Download & discover why readers rave about the world of Wizardoms
I love fantasy, adventure, and magic. More than that, I adore my readers.
My books are written to entertain -- fantasy adventures filled with compelling characters, spectacular magic, thrilling action, constant intrigue, and a sense of discovery. I equate them to the "Marvel Movie" version of fiction, intended to be a fun escape.
I would love to have you join me and my quirky characters for one outrageous adventure after another. With over a million published words, my author journey has just begun.
Best wishes, Jeff
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Jeffrey L. Kohanek grew up in rural Minnesota where comic books sparked his young imagination, inspiring fantasies of heroes with super-powers saving the day. His tastes later evolved to fantasy epics featuring unlikely heroes overcoming impossible odds to save worlds born from the writer's imagination.
Now residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, Jeff uses that imagination to weave tales of engaging characters caught in fantastic plots to inspire young adults and the child within us all. _________________________________
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3.75/5 rounded up Listened to the audiobook(s). Good if you’re looking for a D&D-esque story of ragtag party, found family, and exciting, fantastical adventures.
An entertaining sword-and-sorcery adventure series, though in many ways unoriginal and lacking a lot of polish in its details. The characters don't have a vast amount of depth or much in the way of arcs, but at least the central four are a little more than just their archetype and their plot role (though there is a secondary character whose entire personality is "sword-master"). It needs another thorough editing pass for occasional typos, homonym errors and misplaced commas, plus some dangling modifiers and a few of each of the usual issues with tense, number and punctuation. Most of them are minor issues individually, though it's long enough that collectively there are a lot of them (nearly 240 that I noticed across the three books, and I didn't start marking until partway through because I read the sample first, and you can't annotate those). The first book is the worst; the second and third have few typos, but a good many sentences that don't say what they're meant to say or mangle an idiom, and (sometimes basic) homonym errors and other vocabulary glitches. Notably, every time the author writes "crevice," which is often, he actually means "crevasse."
The author tries for "elevated" language sometimes, and mostly achieves stiff, occasionally stilted, and now and then wrong - as when he substitutes "affixed" for "fixed" in phrases like "fixed his attention," or says "he began up the stairs" instead of "he started up the stairs." This is a common error of people trying to write in a higher register than their natural one: they use what they think is a fancier synonym that sounds similar to the word they mean, but it's actually a different word with different usage and connotations. On the other hand, a lot of the time the language is less formal and filled with coarse humour, mostly about the flatulence of the dwarf.
In the first book, there's what looks like a continuity error. Early in the book, the stoneshaper dwarf, Borgli, says that stoneshapers like him can turn crystal into a substance unbreakable by anyone but another stoneshaper. But later, he says that stoneshapers' powers don't work on crystal at all.
The action is definitely up the cinematic end of things, with people swinging from ropes, catching each other as they're falling, and generally performing over-the-top feats of acrobatics and athletics. We get the accidentally-leaned-on-the-hidden-lever trope, the centuries-old-lava trope, the mysteriously-self-resetting-traps trope, the tunnel behind the waterfall, and so on. Don't wonder too hard about what the monsters live on during the long periods when there are no adventurers happening by, either. Puzzles are solved and safe paths are found by making a guess followed by an assumption that turns out to be right, though it could easily have been wrong.
There's a lot of disbelief to suspend, in other words; it's a switch-your-brain-off-and-enjoy type of book.
The world is mostly generic sword-and-sorcery with not a lot of magic on stage (because the main characters are all some sort of fighter rather than magic-users), apart from things like enchanted lights and weapons and some spectacular set-pieces when they solve a puzzle or trigger a magical trap. There are a couple of times when they have a wizard with them, and those cast fairly familiar-looking spells (fireball, magic missile, lightning bolt...). When we get to a desert country, it's your basic Arabian Nights setup: camels, robes, turbans, scimitars and so on. The Big Bad is even suspiciously similar to the Raven Queen.
The one really original thing about the setting is that the countries, or "wizardoms," are all ruled by wizards, not only at the monarch level but at the level of local lords, which makes sense to me, even if it's seldom seen in fantasy. After all, wizards are powerful, and powerful people tend to end up in charge, especially in a might-makes-right world like most sword-and-sorcery stories are set in. You really need an explanation for why wizards aren't in charge (such as: they're hopelessly impractical; they're easy to kill; there aren't many of them; they're too busy studying Things Man Ought Not to Know to spend time ruling), rather than for why they are.
Anyway, there are plenty of flaws here. Still, it's an entertaining adventure that, at its best, kept me gripped and enjoying the suspense, and for that reason alone it just barely makes it onto my annual recommendation list at the lowest possible level. I should probably rate it three stars, but I've kind of painted myself into a corner with the annual lists giving four stars to anything I largely enjoyed over the past few years, so for consistency, four stars it is.
Found family and an awesome treasure hunting team, what better could one get! The team have very different skills and each one is vital in their quests and a good dose of lady luck, well mostly....Elusive castles, haunted keeps, fighting off monsters of every kind, and I do mean EVERY, that's all par for the course for the crew, because let's face it, treasure hunting is as dangerous as it is exciting.
I love the richness of this world, the richness of the world building, the richness of the events, the richness of the characters. This is like a chunky, thick stew, full bodied, warming, easy to consume and leaves me filled up to to the brim, delicious, solid, with all the delectable nuances, and hearty! THIS is how this book sates me, heck, all of Jeff's books do! Each one I read leaves me knowing I'll revisit this establishment, to once again savour a delightful meal and the varied menu!
Jeff really excels at portraying trickery, transporting me directly into each scene, I feel as though I'm a skulking around, keeping myself hidden as I'm watching it all play out around me, a very captivated invisible bystander. I'm loving this new series, Tor is giving Jerrell a run for his money! Jeff infuses just the right amount of tension to have one chewing on one's nails frantically, without the need to gnaw at the entire hand, always keeping the fun element alive and kicking, which translates into an immensely entertaining read. One can't help but get lost in his storytelling. With the incredible action, with Wizards in the mix, with an evil released from a centuries old tomb and a touch here and there of necromancy, one is hard pressed to release this book for even a minute. The excellent pacing carries one through the events as if riding the perfect wave to end up lapping at the sand, gently, smoothly, like a pebble comes to rest on a beach, basking in the sun, as I am right now with a smile on my face, having reached the end of this strikingly marvelous series.
Although there are fantastical elements, the main characters are normal humans using enchanted items. Except Borgli, the dwarf, who has really cool magical abilities. The first two stories were better than the third. Each book contains a complete story but I was glad I had this boxed set to keep reading since the new quest was introduced in the epilogue. The characters were fun but not especially well-developed. They had flat arcs which is often the case in a series like this. Not a deal breaker, but I was definitely over the same old digs against the other adventurers being used by the end of book two.
What a great adventure. Loved it all. Tor and his crew are all very likeable characters, and the relationship between them all is wonderful. I don't know if their story will continue, but I would love to read more.