This was not an enjoyable read. I quite liked Nicholls' Quicksilver trilogy when I read it a number of years ago, so I decided to give this one a go as well. There are some similarities across the two series but none of it made me like Bodyguard of Lightning - also, speaking of the title... it has practically nothing to do with the story. Using orcs as the central figures is clumsy and cheap as the book relies on the reader to have a strong idea of what an orc is and doesn't construct any sort of interesting cultural or ethnological aspects of the orcs - they are simply humans with badly written (tedious and repetitive) dialogue. Jannesta is a very poor villain, clearly there to mainly provide over-sexualised content that has traditionally been used to sell pulp science fiction and fantasy.

Everything in this book is a cliché or fantasy stereotype and the writing is exceedingly poor in large parts of the book. The battle scenes and fights are boring and formulaic with a lot of passives clogging up the action. Nothing takes you out of a battle scene like the dagger was sent flying and imbedded itself in a floor plank, why do I care about a random dagger? Especially when humans and orcs are fighting to the death? There was also a lot of clumsy use of pronouns for the humans; the book is from the perspective of the orcs so obviously Nicholls is trying to "other" the humans by using inanimate pronouns (it), however, this is not consistent sentence to sentence and ends up in some strange ambiguities about who is actually stabbing/killing whom. I won't spoil the end in case you still want to read the book after reading this review, but it was extraordinarily cliffhangery - almost as if all attempts had been made to leave as many possible plot points unresolved, which left me with an even more unsatisfactory feeling after reading it and certainly didn't achieve its aim of trying to get me to buy the next book in the series.

In short, everything about this book screams marketing strategies with almost no attention to the actual content of the novel. There are plenty of ways to sell books by writing good content, even in the pulp fiction sphere, but this is definitely not it.