I'll start off with the final synopsis: this book is bad. It's probably a step above very bad although it does dip into those waters on several occasions.
I'll start with the foundation of any book: the writing. I understand that this is supposed to be faux-high fantasy, but CL Werner does not have the chops to write like Tolkien. Rather what he does is seem to have a thesaurus permanently next to his lap top to which he refers to constantly. He can hardly describe a single thing without turning it into some verbose profusion of nonsense. This especially plagues the portion of the book that has to do with the Chaos sorcerer. He starts this trend right out of the gate with my least favorite quote of the book,
"Possibilities and potentialities, the twistings of doom and fate, the shadows of futures yet unmade. Scenes of glorious victory and visions of annihilating disaster, each waxing and waning like the falling sands of time."
This reads like some college freshman's intro to fiction class, or one of those abyssal "rate my prologue" posts that often crops up on Reddit. I read most of the prose of this book under the impression that this was Werner's first novel. Imagine my surprise when I found out it wasn't.
Okay, so you don't care about the writing. That's totally fair, you gotta be pretty picky to care about that. What about characters? Ugh, bad news for you there. There aren't any. Sure, there's a bunch of cardboard dwarves stomping around, but every single one of them is so one note that they might as well be re-named like the ones in Snow White. Over here we have Captain Worrywart. There's Sergeant Drinking. Down below is Greedy. That one over there with the harpoon? That's Hunter. That sick dwarf we rescued? That's Plot Device. None of these so-called characters do anything approaching development, and it's because none of them have any sort of desires or needs that get challenged. The captain doesn't want to take risks and he doesn't the whole book. The greedy one is greedy and stays that way the whole book. The replacement captain (can anyone actually keep their names straight?) is worried about his ability to lead and remains that way the whole book. None of them change, none of them grow, none of them do ANYTHING other that resort to their one character trait and hammer it home.
That's not to even mention the Chaos sorcerer and the Chaos warlord. Their entire interactions together can be summed up in this conversation:
Sorcerer: I have a vague plan.
Warlord: I don't like your vague plan. Let's be more direct.
Sorcerer: No.
Warlord: Watch yourself. I can kill you if I want to. (proceeds to follow the vague plan)
This conversation gets repeated three times in the book over DOZENS of pages. I wish I was joking.
Writing sucks. Characters suck. What about the juicy, juicy plot? Ha! As if! Ol' Werner clearly sat down to this book without the slightest idea of how it would end because it's quite obvious that he made it up as he went along. The dwarves get shunted from plot point to plot point like they're on the world's most direct roller coaster. There's no overarching goals, there's no direction, there's no destination. They react to what's directly in front of them and then go to the next checkpoint that the NPC's point out to them. What makes this worse is that the Chaos sorcerer is supposedly orchestrated events to direct them through all these checkpoints! Here's a quick bullet point of the plot.
Wreck a dwarf fleet using a dragon.
Somehow hope that one dwarf survives
Hope that the local human tribe finds the wreck
Hope the humans signal more dwarfs
Hope the humans direct the dwarfs to the wreck
Hope the dwarfs go to the wreck and stumble upon the surviving dwarf
Hope the surviving dwarf tells them about the secret cache of gold
Hope the go get the secret cache of gold
Hope that they HAVE STORAGE CONCERNS SO THEY DECIDE TO SMELT THE GOLD DUST INTO INGOTS
Hope the go to the old haunted refinery
Hope the resurrect the secret gold demon THAT WAS IN THE GOLD DUST ALL ALONG!!!!
It's insane. I'm not exaggerating, but the sorcerer brags several times about how genius this plan is. There's no universe in which a human author sat down and sat all this through. This isn't a book so much as it is a loose collection of plot points, cardboard cutouts, and hideously generic actions scenes (man, nobody has shot anything in twenty pages, I wonder what's about to happen next? Seriously, you could set you watch by how regularly these boring action scenes showed up).
All in all, if you love Age of Sigmar or Kharadron Overlords (I actually play with them in the game; it's why I bought this book) then you might draw a slight sense of enjoyment from this, but it's deeply repressed by the mediocrity that's heaped everywhere.