King's Gate: A High Fantasy Harem

Deserves an award for best supporting cast ! Riley, who joins fairly late on is just perfect.The world has a lot of un-answered questions behind it, I'd suspect most will be answered as the series progresses. The issue I have is with the Hero - he's an arse, a contradictory arse at that. The preamble to the story has him clearly state he's ex-military, highly trained and disciplined. Then why is one of his asinine comments that he doesn't like taking orders ? That's followed by pulling alpha male rank on the one person who's actually trying to help him. Excuse me - even the most highly trained and independent special forces operators know how to take orders and get the best out of the local intelligence. This guy just runs around and aggravates everyone he meets for the first half of the book.He starts to come round towards the final few chapters but by then you've lost some of the empathy you're meant to find in him. Will see how it develops in volume 2, but things need to shape up or it's getting dropped.

I had to give up on this book about half way through. The characters are shallow, no depth to them. The story is more like a plotline. Things happen without any explanation or lead in. Main characters magic increases in power without any story to explain why. Also he states he's been practicing the magic, When? Nothing in the story to explain this. Too much plotline not enough depth of story.