It is with this background that Marked for Death begins. The story focuses on the friends and family of a man named Kandler, a veteran of the Last War. Kandler lives with his close friend, the semi-lycanthopic "Shifter"Burch, and his step-daughter, an elf-child named Esprë. This small band lives in a community that borders what was once one of the great nations of the world, but which is now a land of dust and death having been destroyed in an almost nuclear cataclysm at the end of the Last War.
Recently citizens of the town have been disappearing mysteriously, and Kandler's step-daughter has manifested a Dragonmark now that she has entered puberty. Things are very tense in the small border community, but are about to get worse.
Two groups of strangers have, by different means, discovered that the Mark of Death has reappeared and have come to the border community in hopes of capturing the person bearing the Mark. One group desires to keep the Mark out of "evil hands" and the other desires to conquer Eberron.
From this point on, the novel becomes a pursuit/rescue narrative very similar to the Carson of Venus tales by Edgar Rice Burroughs, both for better and for worse. Esprë is captured, rescued, and recaptured no less than three times in Marked for Death which can lead the reader into some frustration. Forbeck is attempting to build the cast for the series while simultaneously maintaining a cliffhanger narrative. This is not an easy task and Forbeck does a yeoman's job of it.
Forbeck's narrative style is crisp and easy to read and moves at a breakneck pace. The reader isn't left with much time to breathe. Surprisingly, Forbeck manages to insert a good amount of character development into the narrative and the reader leaves the book caring about the protagonists more at the end of the novel than at the beginning, but the character development is tied tightly to the romantic B storyline. Forbeck thus underdevelops one of the more entertaining characters in the book, Burch. Readers might find Burch fun and exciting, but he is a friend we see but don't yet know.
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