Ah, old Sumerian setting filled with palace intrigue and murder, enjoyable and twists and turns throughout

NOTE: The copy of this book I started was pre-release.

DNF. In its present state of more errors than readable tale i can't recommend this book at all. Hopefully it'll get a good edit and fixed soon. I'll be more than happy to start it again.

I really wanted to love this book, but for some reason, it just didn't quite sit well with me. While there were a number of things that I liked – the world, the magic system, the research behind the novel, the suspense didn't quite work for me neither did the characters. The only character I grew truly fond of (and got to know in such a way that I actually cared for him) was Ashmadu, the others seemed simply 'puppets', plot devices to move the story forward and couldn't feel an inch of emotion for them.

The story was also hard to follow for a while because of all the foreign phrases, names and titles; I do not know many things of ancient Mesopotamia or the sumers so the language and all these names were confusing and up until half of the novel I actually had to keep track of who was who and what their titles meant. This kept me from getting more deeply involved with the story.

My main issue was that the mystery simply wasn't interesting, especially because we get to know who the culprit is in the beginning; and from then, I just simply couldn't care. It could've been interesting to see the other characters trying to solve the mystery and figure out, who's behind all the murders, but it wasn't written in an interesting way. Also, I found the villain extremely dumb and cliché. There was nothing unique about them. It's such a shame because the writing itself was good and the world was super interesting (seriously, Atlantis! how cool is that), but I was just honestly bored with most of the novel.

I really, really wanted to like this book. An urban fantasy/murder mystery set in a magical lost civilization? It sounded terrific. Unfortunately, the writing left me cold. The characters were interesting enough, but the text was so riddled with errors that I had to keep stopping to re-write it in my head: run-on sentences, sentence fragments, missing commas, misused commas, repetitive descriptions, weird jumps between scenes, and the list goes on. Yes, I received a preview copy from netgalley, but I highly doubt that the author had time to send it out for a copy edit and rewrite before it was released. The author shows promise, but he needs to take a writing course to nail down the basics of grammar and sentence structure (or hire a really good editor). Sorry, but I cannot recommend Saving Eridu.