Conan and the Amazon

Plot

Fresh from a failed rebellion in Brythunia, in which he served as a mercenary on the losing side, Conan joins forces with the band of Achilea, deposed queen of the Amazons. They wend their way through Zamora and Koth into the deserts to the southeast. They eventually reach the lost city of Jangar, cursed by the gods after an ancient battle. Jangar's people, loathing the sun, live in a subterranean city beneath the ruins of the old one. Conan and his allies are trapped in a gladitorial combat with a ferocious giant crocodile as city approaches its foreordained doom.

Reception

Don D'Ammassa, writing of Roberts' Conan novels, noted that "[a]lthough Roberts did not recreate Howard's character exactly, making him more intellectual and less inclined to solve every problem by hitting it with a sword, his evocation of the barbaric setting is superior to that of most of the other writers contributing to the series."

Reviewer Ryan Harvey considered Roberts "the most consistently entertaining" of the Tor Conan authors, showing "deft ability with storytelling and action scenes, and a thankful tendency not to overplay his hand and try to ape Robert E. Howard’s style. ... However, Roberts had his down moments, and alas he stumbled at the finish line. Conan and the Amazon is the last of Roberts’s Conan novels. It’s also his poorest." He rates it "above average for the Tor novels, [but] a disappointment for its author. It moves too slowly, and the action is jumbled into a hasty mess at the conclusion." In another place he notes that he "would hate to judge John Maddox Roberts based on Conan and the Amazon ... [a] poor work... from [an] otherwise skilled pastiche writer..."