This 13th Gor novel marks the halfway point in the series thus far. (As I write this the 26th book is being prepared for publication after a 13 year hiatus and a 27th volume has been announced.) In this one Tarl Cabot once more goes on a mission for the Priest-Kings, this time to recover the shield ring of the Kurii (last seen in Volume 10, Tribesmen of Gor). During his wanderings through the African landscape of the unexplored equatorial region of Gor he encounters intrigue, treachery, a hidden empire, crocodilian river tharlarion, cannibals, a boar-like tarsk, pygmies, army ants, amazons, an 8-foot thick rock spider, a lost city, a ring of invisibility, and the Kurii. Sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's not as exciting as it sounds. None of those things show up until you're about 200 pages into the novel! Somehow the villains in this one don't seem as villainous and the dangers don't seem as threatening as they should be. In his better adventures Tarl Cabot usually meets up with a stereotypical rogue who is charming, knowledgeable, a true warrior, and knows how to handle women a la Gor (i.e., terrorize, brutalize, and rape them). In this one the role was divided between 2 characters: Ayare who is the smart charmer and Kisu who is a violent lout (which is good on Gor). It just doesn't work as well. But the real reason this one didn't click is because the flow of the story was continually broken up by interminable discussions of Gorean philosophy. At 464 pages this may very well be the longest of all the Gorean books (some of the later ones have more pages but they also have bigger print). The difference in length is taken up entirely by the theory and practice of the enslavement of females. The author may have invented a few new ways to restrict his slave girls both physically and psychologically but philosophically speaking I don't recall anything in this book that he hasn't already beaten to death in previous volumes. At this point in the series he is just preaching to the converted---if you've bought in to his point of view, it's redundant and if you haven't, further haranguing will not change your mind. I realize that a lot of the people who buy his novels are into bd/sm and therefore expect this but I suspect that there are a lot of readers who are not. It would better serve the stories and all of the readers to confine the bd/sm aspects to example and leave the unnecessary and unrealistic philosophical discussions out.