A Gladiator’s Love by Lance Morcan – book review and giveaway

Disclosure.  This post is a review of an e-book I was sent for free.  All opinions are my own.

I have received a free e-copy of the book A Gladiator’s Love by Lance Morcan to review. You may find out more about the author on his website.

Here is the book blurb.

In this action-romance short story, dashing Greek gladiator Leonidas promises his true love he’ll buy her freedom if he wins his own in the Colosseum of Ancient Rome. First he must defeat an opponent he knows he cannot kill.

The year is 83AD and it’s nine years since Roman soldiers killed a young Leonidas’s family in their farmhouse outside Athens and consigned him to the life of a gladiator at Ludus Magnus, one of the biggest and best ludi gladiatori, or gladiator schools, in Rome. Since then, he remains undefeated after twenty-five fights and has risen to the top of the gladiator rankings.

The Greek gladiator craves freedom. The one good thing in his life is Fatuma, an Ethiopian beauty who is a gladiatrix, or female gladiator, and who has stolen his heart. They share fleeting but precious hours together after dark in Leonidas’s cell – a concession occasionally granted to the gladiators by their Roman masters.

The outcome of Leonidas’s next fight will decide both their futures for he’ll be fighting Gaius, another undefeated gladiator who held the Greek to a bloody draw when they met in the arena previously. At stake will be the rudis, the small wooden sword given to gladiators who are granted their freedom.

This is a short story of just 43 pages, so I read it very quickly.

The story begins with a flashback nightmare to when Greek Leonidas was enslaved and the rest of his family killed 9 years previously. He was kept alive to be sold as a gladiator and he has been climbing the rankings ever since due to his great fighting skill. In 2 months time, he will be pitted in a fight to the death against Gaius, where the winner will be granted freedom, so long as he wins tomorrow’s fight against Philo.

Meanwhile as tradition dictates on the night before a fight, he has been allowed to sleep with someone. Of course, as always, he has chosen Ethiopian Fatuma, a female gladiatrix, whom he is in love with. If he wins his freedom, he plans to earn lots of money, to buy Fatuma’s freedom too.

But how will it all play out? As the story unfolded I did guess one of the twists, but not the ending.

This is the second short story of Lance’s that I have read, the first being The Last Tasmanian Tiger and in my opinion they would both be better suited to being part of an anthology rather than a book on its own. Still a good read though.

A Gladiator’s Love is available on Amazon, currently priced at £1.99 in Kindle format. An enjoyable short story. Lance is a very versatile author as this is quite a different genre to the brilliant Silent Fear full-length novel that I absolutely loved, which Lance wrote with his son James, plus they write non-fiction and novellas too.

And I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a kindle copy of A Gladiator’s Love to one lucky winner. Open worldwide.
Plus you don’t even need to own a kindle to read this, as you can download the kindle app free to your phone or tablet.

a Rafflecopter giveaway – Please click on the link to enter.

And you may see my other giveaways here.

I’d love to hear about your favourite read.

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