Forgotten Ruin – This one did not work for me.

Forgotten Ruin (Forgotten Ruin, #1).
By Jason Anspach and Nick Cole.
My rating ⭐ 1/2 out of 5 stars.

Tolkien meets Shock and Awe.

Orcs. Trolls. Wraith riders. Dark wizards. Together, they form an unstoppable force. Or so they thought.

Dark Army… meet the U.S. Army Rangers.

When a Joint Task Force of elite Rangers are transported to a strange and fantastic future where science and evolution have incarnated the evils of myth and legend, they find themselves surrounded, pinned down, and in a desperate fight for their very survival—against nightmares of flesh and blood made real. Which means only one thing.

It’s time to Ranger Up and stack bodies.

The forces of evil have no idea how dangerous a Ranger has been trained to be, and once the action starts, it won’t let up in this no-holds-barred, full-auto, epic battle for survival in the Forgotten Ruin.

The blurb for this book sounded cool but maybe I should have been more careful when said blurb tried to profit from the Tolkien name with nonsensical statements like “Tolkien meets Shock and Awe”. This book simply didn’t work for me.

The book starts off directly with our heroes, the Army Rangers, not only already being thrown into this future but already thick in combat with orcs etc… No real explanation or anything just orc killing en masse.

I would have hoped that there would be some decent start, some build up where said Army Rangers slowly discovered that there were things that go bump in the night and all that. You know, the what the f… surprise part of the story. Maybe even some explanation as to how they ended up in this little pickle.

But no, we are just thrown into the middle of a huge fight and that is pretty much how the book continues. The book really felt more like a walkthrough of a 1st person shooter than a real book to me. Things just happen, one strange creature after another appears, the rangers suddenly develop magical powers and so on and so forth. In the interludes between he shooter acts the main protagonist is “monologueing” the reader to death.

To be honest, I felt the story to be implausible even for a fantasy book. The writer tries to make some explanation as to why a task force of Army Rangers are propelled into the future but it is glossed over rather rapidly and the how is entirely left out. Speaking of how, said Army Rangers, are using very conventional weapons of today but they apparently have a replicator. Seriously?

The characters, well, to me they are fairly forgettable. The only person that had some (bad) charisma was the political idiot who, luckily, didn’t survive this first book in the series.

So no, this series is one I will not continue.