Basics of the book: Its very plainly a D&D game with D&D characters using mostly D&D rules. It pulls together a group of adventurers with back story, and runs them through a short adventure that lets takes them through nentir and into thunderspire, ending with a Deus Ex Machina defeat of an enemy they couldn't hope to defeat. Enemies in the book pretty much are straight out of the monster manuel, and use powers pretty much straight out of their stat block. I counted kobold wyrmpriests, dragon shields, vampire spawn, vampire lord, carrion crawler, decrepit skeleton were called by name and all pretty much behaving as they would in a game, in some cases down to the powers (there were others, but they were less name straight out of the book) Characters were similar. Wizards all used light (many many times) and magic missle (many many times), and pretty much every other spell they cast were straight out of PHB1. The warlock was similar (edlritch blasts are described as being "eldritch blasts" etc) Divine characters are less obvious, or maybe I'm just less familiar with their powers, but I only caught them using actual power names once or twice for the cleric, and never for the paladin. Martial characters were much more vague, they seemed to just swing their swords/hammers as they liked. There is also a revenant assassin, but i think he only shows up in the books of DDI subscribers. As a player of an assassin, i pretty much recognized everything he did as a power.
The 'gameyness' always bothers me, whether its this bad, or even just some of RA Salvatores stuff. It pulls me out of the story pretty harshly because it imposes constraints that are important for a game, but kludgey for a narrative.
That complaint aside it was very readable, had a good setting, moved quickly and had a plot. I would rank it medium, mostly because the gameyness lead to suboptimal storytelling, but as some have said its not written at a very high level. I could read more by Mr. Bill, but I won't feel any real desire to.
