The warlord of Mars #3

The Warlord of Mars is a science fantasy novel by the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the third book of his Barsoom series and the last of the three that were written as a single sequence.

The book picks up six months after The Princess of Mars, with John Carter still searching for Dejah Thoris. She is held in a place that no Martian can enter, because the custom that protects it is religious rather than practical, and the arrangement gives Carter a fixed period in which to find another way. The novel is built on disguises, journeys across the planet and a series of hostile rulers, and it keeps the pace of a serial even in book form. Burroughs frames the story as a manuscript that reached him from his uncle, the same device he used in the earlier books, and the three early Barsoom novels together have been read as the beginning of American planetary romance.

The later books in the series extend the account of Barsoom, and Carter appears in several of them, but this volume completes the first story he tells.