Reviews and Comments

Desert Raiders is the third book in the Hammer of the Emperor, and the fourth book from the Astra Militarum series, because they put them in the omnibus backwards for some reason. I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Of course we follow the Tallarn Desert Raiders, and they are actually quite an interesting Regiment. Unsurprisingly they are very Arab inspired, and with that at first I was worried about this being some British guy writing some poorly understood planet of hats group. Turns out hough, Soulban is Arabian, and the depiction of different Tallarn tribes being made to work together creates some interesting lore and conflict. We have a Cadian commissar, which once again scared me because I did not want to read about some white mans burden character showing the savages how to work together, but again, that didn’t happen. The commisar, Rezail has and adjutant Tyrell, who is from a third tribe that tries to stop the larger two from killing each other constantly, and he actually explains to Rezail all of the issues and is the one to deal with it. This novel, we again get a different enemy faction, this time its the Tyranids. They’re a decent enough enemy for our characters, I don’t have any complaints about them. They are suitably grimdark, and they aren’t watered down to be an easy foe. My biggest issue with the book is that there is maybe a bit too much fighting. I get it, it’s warhammer, but I do like to have some downtime but that might just be me. On the whole, this was a pretty good book. As always, I love seeing factions being expanded upon to be less one note. I do really like the lore and details about the Tallarn now, and they are probably one of my favourite regiments. They were treated the way I wish every regiment was in this series, and it makes it stand out amongst the rest of these stories.

Ice Guard is the second novel in the Hammer of the Emperor omnibus, and the fifth novel in the Astra Militarum series. This one follows the Valhallan Ice Warriors on their quest to rescue a preacher from a group of traitors on a planet about to be exterminatus’d. So, this book is kind of short, its only like ~160 pages as opposed to Gunheads’ ~300, so I don’t think there’s that much that I can say really overall. I don’t have that much to compliment in this book, so ill do it all here. The story is competent, it’s a bit nice to see enemies tat aren’t just orks again like that have been in every story in this series so far, hopefully there will be some more variety in later books. There is something that I found quite surprising, a female guardswoman. I didn’t expect that, and then I also didn’t expect the author to explain that there aren’t many women in the Ice Warriors since most of them are busy breeding back on Valhalla. So then there are the negatives. I found this book pretty unengaging, I’m glad that its short. There’s a bunch of loyal mutants that some of our characters are racist to, doesn’t really feel like that is portrayed like a bad thing which is kind of gross. One of our main characters gets captured but doesn’t get converted because he’s too much of an Emperor’s good boy. Its just a bunch of uninteresting, boring stuff happening. Again, this book isn’t long, so I don’t have much to say, but I didn’t like it. I’ll never read this again.

Void Stalker is the third and final novel in the Night Lords trilogy. This time, our crew are hunted by the Aeldari of Craftworld Ulthwé, as they seek to destroy the legion where it had been destroyed before, Tsagualsa. Unlike the first two books in the trilogy, the Night Lords are alone now, and Talos is in charge. While this may seem to be smart as he is the prophet, recent premonitions have not turned out to be as accurate has they had been before. With Talos now in command, his view of the legion is more centre stage than it was in the Blood Reaver, and I like it a lot. Previously, in his discussions with Ruven, Talos agrees with him. Thinking that the legion has fallen from where it once was, and he wants them to start winning, and he tries to bring them back to what they were. Talos brinks his company to Tsagualsa, which is now inhabited by imperial colonist, and he ruins it. He slaughters civilians, deals good damage to a company of the Genesis Chapter, and blacks out a large chunk of space. This feels really great to see, even if what is happening is truly horrific. For 2 novels our protagonists have been the underdogs, struggling to get by, doing little but acting as pirates or small raiding parties for larger traitor forces. So seeing them do well on their own really shows how Talos is as a character, and what he wants the Night Lords to be, even if others like Xarl disagree on what they really are. With the other characters, we’ve also got Uzas again, and I think this book really solidifies him as one of my favourite characters in Warhammer fiction now. At some points in this novel we get to see him lucid, not just brief moments of reduced bloodlust, but actual lucid moments, like a more regular marine, and its an interesting contrast. On the other hand, even also got Cyrion, who gets more development in this book to show how much of a prick he his. And while he is truly a bad person, its completely believable that this is who he is. Also, to my surprise, Septimus and Octavia aren’t that bad in this book, they’re barely around. At the start I was afraid, its revealed that Octavia is pregnant, and I expected it to be a big plot point that everything revolved around, but it doesn’t. Now they just want to live their lives as relatively normally as they can, away from their slavery under the night lords, it makes sense. One more thing ill note about the characters that I didn’t realize until this book, but is true for the whole trilogy, is that they can all die. Of course characters can always die in novels, but if you read a Mephiston novel, you know he’ll survive, he has a model. None of these characters have models, so they can just be killed off if that’s what ADB decides, and that helps add suspense to combat when you realise it. Other neat parts of the book are things like a flashback to when Tsagualsa first fell after the death of Curze. Like with the flashbacks to the Siege of Terra in the last book it lets us see how the characters are slightly different. Here however I feel we get a bit more detail, we see Uzas more before his corruption, and even the First Claws previous leader. While this is interesting, I don’t feel it adds that much to the plot for it to be necessary. I also like how at a few points we really get to see how different marines are to mortals. Talos and Octavia talk a bit about morals, with Octavia obviously thinking Talos is kind of a psycho, but Talos just doesn’t really get how its bad because of how he was trained. Talos also stays awake for 3 weeks straight, which is just a neat little detail. One more little thing that I like here, and in the previous book, is how we get to see insignificant loyalist chapters doing things. Like, who cares about the Genesis Chapter? Very few I’d bet, but they are shown here, and I like that. There aren’t really any major negatives that I can think of, which is good, but I don’t know that I’ll say that its perfect, even if like Blood Reaver, it was pretty close. This novel excels in all the same ways to previous two did, and I don’t know that I could have asked for a better finale to the trilogy. How everything ends up is very bittersweet, which sounds like a weird way to describe a story about superhuman psycho murderers, but I do genuinely love these characters. I’d love it if there was more about them out there, but what we got is truly amazing. Maybe one day we can see what the Night Lords are doing after the 13th Black Crusade, one can only hope.

Blood Reaver is the second novel in the Night Lords trilogy. We follow the Talos and the First Claw in their dealings with Huron Blackheart, the titular Blood Reaver, leader of the Red Corsairs. With the quality of Soul Hunter, I expect this novel to be just as good. Much like the last book, in Blood Reaver, the Night Lords are temporarily bound to a larger group of traitors. In the Soul Hunter, it was Abaddon and the Black Legion, because the Exalted allied them together, and now that the Night Lords betrayed them, they instead seek refuge with the Blood Reaver, Huron Blackheart and his Red Corsairs. Of course, our characters are Night Lords, their loyalty is only to themselves, and as soon as they meet see the Red Corsairs, they see a ship, the Echo of Damnation, a ship that was a Night Lords vessel from the Great Crusade. Upon seeing a Night Lords ship under control of people not born of Nostramo, the Exalted and the First Claw decide that they will take it back. The way the Night Lords only care about themselves, and how something as petty as a ship being owned by someone else is worth risking all of their marines and crews lives over is so good. Speaking of good, once again that characters in this novel are great, despite one glaring issue I will discuss later. All of the space marine characters are great. Talos is still dedicated to how the legion used to be with Curze in command. There is a particular interaction between him and a legionary who abandoned the Night Lords to join the Black Legion, Ruven, who we saw int the last novel, that I think does very well to characterise both of our characters. It gives us a very good reason that any marine would abandon their legion or chapter to join the Black Legion, and while of course Talos disagrees with this, he had abandoned him to die earlier in the novel for being a traitor, he does agree with part of what he says. Something I didn’t expect from this book was how they treated Uzas. In the previous novel he mostly just comes across as a Khornate berserker, and while that is an apt description of him, in Blood Reaver he gets some good characterisation, to the point where his is almost my favourite character. We get to see times where his bloodlust isn’t so present, where he can just talk like a relatively normal marine with Talos. He tries to convince Talos that the legion was never that great, that they were always corrupt, and it just is so nice to see his corrupted, yet arguably accurate perspective. The other marines are still good too, Xarl, Cyrion, and Mercution are both still enjoyable to read, Ruven comes across like a total dick but the conversation with Talos I mentioned before does give some depth to his character. One particular scene that I quite like with the marines is Talos in one of his transes, where we get to see the Siege of Terra, with all of the characters we know 10000 years earlier, before the corruption and loss of any lack of hope they have now. Then there’s the human characters, with Septimus and Octavia, as well as the new introductions of Hound and Maruk. We focus a bit more on Ocativa in this one, where she has here new attendant, Hound. I quite like these characters together, Octavia is around being haunted by a ghost girl, with Hound trying to take care of her, even if she finds him a bit disgusting. Septimus is with the new slave Maruk for most of this one and they’re alright together, Maruk being new is pretty much going alone with everything Septimus is doing and just being grossed out and stuff. There is one scene on Hells Iris, a Red Corsairs/traitor port that we spend some time at, where Septimus and Maruk abduct a pregnant woman, which just feels kinda out of place, and nothing really comes from it. Now is the complaint that I mentioned earlier, its Septimus and Octavias interactions. In Soul Hunter, I liked them together, they Octavia learning about how the ship works with is crew and all was nice to see, and there is still more of that here that I quite like again. However, they’re in love with each other now, and it doesn’t feel right. For a while when they interact Octavia just keeps calling him an idiot, which always just feels like that awful anime trope of “its not like I like you or anything, baka!”, or “heretic!” in this case I suppose. It all just comes across with a man writing woman energy that I didn’t feel was present in Soul Hunter, or Betrayer with Lotara Sarin. Now while I complain about this, their lovey interactions came up a few times. As I said at the start Octavia calls him an idiot a bunch which is annoying, but theres only really 3 scenes, which weren’t that long, of them being in love together. While this was definitely the worst part of the book, there isn’t much of it, so it doesn’t ruin the novel. I thought it could just be a neat little ship that you might get to see fan art of, but unfortunately its canon, and not done particularly well. The only other complaint I have is one that comes up in all of ADB’s books, which is the onomatopoeia which is uses occasionally, which is just a writing technique that I never like. Now even with all of these complaints, I really cant be too negative about this book. I genuinely loved it. All of the marine characters and the journey they go on is such a joy to read. The development we get for characters that came across as relatively one-note in Soul Hunter elevates them, and as I mentioned Uzas is now one of my favourite characters here, honestly right next to Talos at the top. The only thing that really holds this book back is the interactions between Septimus and Octavia. But even then, I loved this book, and can’t wait to read the final book, Void Stalker.

Soul Hunter is the first novel in the Night Lords trilogy, and (from what I understand) his second novel published at Black Library. It follows Talos, the titular Soul Hunter (though no one really calls him that most of the time), and the First Claw of the Night Lords 10th company. Whenever you hear someone asking for the best Warhammer 40k novels, there’s often someone who will mention the Night Lords trilogy, and being a massive fan of his works in the Horus Heresy, I finally decided to sit down and see if this really lives up to its hype. The Night Lords are evil. Even when thinking about how everyone in 40k is evil, the Night Lords are evil, and that sounds like it could make it difficult to be connected to protagonists like that. Despite this, ADB succeeds in creating a cast of genuinely interesting characters who are all enjoyable to read. Talos, the Soul Hunter, and the Prophet of the 10th Company we follow joined by his squad mates in the First Claw, Uzas, Xarl, and Cyrion, as well as by his slaves, Septimus and Octavia. Each member of the First Claw is their own unique and interesting characters. Talos is serious, and deeply cares about the Night Lords even after 10000 years and acts someone as a leader to the squad. Xarl seems to be a relatively normal Night Lords marine, being somewhat close to Talos, but not really liking any of them. Then Uzas is a crazed Khorne worshiper, and Cyrion is a somewhat humours individual who no one seems to really trust. All of these characters clearly have some level of disdain for each other, but it still feels like they are battle-brothers who would die for each other. Even the slaves are enjoyable to read, Octavis starts off as Eurydice, a navigator who is kidnaped and enslaved by the Night Lords, and Septimus, a long-time slave of Talos who tries his best to keep his masters and Octavia alive. There are several other interesting characters of note, The Exalted, 10th companies possessed captain, Malcharion, the War Sage who has been trapped in dreadnought armour for thousands of years, even Abaddon is their briefly. The Exalted is the closes thing we get to a main antagonist of the story, as he continually wastes Night Lords lives trying to do as Abaddon commands of him, which also trying to get rid of Talos as he fears he will try to take control of the company. Octavia is also a good character because of how she is used at the beginning of the book. As we see how she is taken and forced into working for the Night Lords, we get to have the outsider’s perspective of the Night Lords that we wouldn’t get from one of them or Septimus. Being a relatively normal Imperial citizen, she cares about the god emperor, and doesn’t really know much about the Night Lords, but through her interactions with Septimus, it develops a feel for how they function on their own ship, and how their slaves deal with them. As we see the First Claw and how they deal with the story, we get a good picture of who the Night Lords are as a (very divided) legion. While Talos and Xarl clearly have a great distain for Chaos and its gods, believing that the legion should be free of gods, Uzas and The Exalted, the companies captain, show that no mater how hard they try, the legion is already corrupted. We also see that while the Night Lords are kind of greedy cowards. Whenever the go into conflict on their own terms they always are in hiding, trying to inflict as much fear into their enemies as they can, which is a smart tactic, but somewhat cowardly for Space Marines. As well as this, when a large group of Blood Angels arrive at the end of the book, instead of helping Abaddon and his Black Legion forces they are fighting with, they abandon the war effort and run away. I love this, it is so much more interesting than just “we are heroic soldiers of x cause, and we know no fear”, they act somewhat logically all in desire of self-preservation. At a few points in the book, we get to see flashbacks to Talos just before Konrad Curze, the Night Lords primarch’s death, and how he and the rest of the legion dealt with that. No as much praise as I heap upon this book, there are still a few criticisms I can level at it. While I mentioned that Octavias usage at the beginning of the book helps establish the Night Lords as a group, after around the halfway point she kind of just stops showing up. We spend most of our time with Talos and First Claw, which makes sense, but her just disappearing from the story is kind of weird. Also at some points where ADB uses some weird onomatopoeia which just reads weird, not something that kills the mood, but it feels somewhat out of place. So having finally read the book, I can gladly (and unsurprisingly) say that this is a good story. I really enjoy all of the characters and how they all interact with each other, and how they deal with all the situations they get forced into by their leaders. This novel is a great start to a trilogy I look forward to continuing immediately.

Cadia Stands, by Justin D Hill, is about the battle for Cadia during Abaddon’s 13th Black Crusade. We follow the perspectives of a few different Cadians as they try to survive a loosing battle. I have a bit of history with the novel. Back in 2018-19, I had been out of Warhammer for a while, until I heard this novel mentioned in a RimmyDownunderGaming video. I thought it seemed neat, so I picked it up. And now I’m back into Warhammer, and its arguably thanks to this book. But I haven’t read it since 2018-19, so I’m interested to see how good it really is. Cadia stands takes the perspectives of a handful of different characters, some only for a few pages or a chapter, and some get several chapters. Most of the characters who just get a few pages just die, or a implied to die later in the battle. I kind of like this, it gives us faces to the untold masses being killed, and can help make it really feel like it is a losing battle. We even briefly get a commissar who everyone hates for killing too many people. A bit of hatred towards Imperial hierarchy is always nice. For the more longstanding characters though, we have General Bendikt, General Grüber, and seemingly the fan favourite based on how many novels she has, Whiteshield Minka Lesk. Bendikt doesn’t start off as a general, he begins a rank bellow Grüber but is promoted by Ursarka E Creed. At the start of the novel it feels like Bendikt is an important character, but honestly he doesn’t really do much in the novel. For basically half of it he is stuck up a mountain waiting for orders, but he does get let loose eventually with a horde of tanks to give salvation to the rest of the Cadians. However even when this happens, its not too interesting. Its just ok. He doesn’t really have much agency of his own. I didn’t expect Grüber to be one of the more important characters, and I felt that way for most of the novel. By then end of it though, he is basically the main character for the last quarter of the book. He actually has a bit of development which is kind of nice to see. He starts of as just a grubby general without much charisma to him. He is annoyed by Creed for being a young upstart that everyone likes, but he does eventually realise the charisma is necessary for him to be a good commander of his troops. He proves himself later as a courageous soldier, and eventually ends up being basically the leader of what remains of the Cadians. As I mentioned, Minka is clearly the fan favourite, or at least Hill’s favourite, because as far as I can tell, she’s the only one of these three in the next few Cadia novels. I can kind of see why she’s a favourite. Bendikt doesn’t do much, and Grüber is pretty much just a general, so Minka, a Whiteshield, a new recruit fighting in the most important battle since the Horus Heresy is something interesting. And she does actually get to do things. She fights in battles and has some difficulty in getting of planet. As well as this, she is basically the first Guardswoman that I have seen in Warhammer novels, which is nice to see, and likely contributed to her popularity. So now I’ve mentioned some positives and gone over the main characters, its time to lay down some criticisms. Remember how I mentioned that Bendikt is stuck up a mountain for a while? While he is stuck, the first hundred or so days of the battle for Cadia is happening. We don’t get to see Minka, or anyone else’s perspective of these days, we just get told that the Cadians are losing day by day. We do get to see one random General getting demolished by a Chaos Lord, but it is mostly just stuff being told to us. After this though we are shown not told what is happening. Like I praised before, randoms being killed and our main characters fighting is good, its good to show us characters experiencing something rather than just being told it’s happening. Now while it is good to show characters, it feels a little off here. We keep being told that the Cadians are losing, and we see random Cadians loosing, but for most of the novel our main characters don’t really struggle, even Minka, who definitely struggles the most of the three, doesn’t feel like she’s doing that bad. But then again, when Cadia actually begins to fall, as in when the entire planet literally breaks, we do feel like they’re losing. The ground is shaken, evacuation plans are broken immediately, and randoms loose hope. There’s a nice part in the book where instead of Creed doing his daily announcement a voice just reads passages from an Imperial propaganda book. These movements feel hopeless, I just think Minka and the others should have been more in line with this tone. In the end, Cadia Stands is a decent book. Its not exceptional, the tone can feel a little off at times, I think our characters could have struggled a bit more, and one character didn’t really feel like he did much. Despite this though, Minka, and too my surprise, Grüber were enjoyable enough for me to not be able to dislike the book. In the end, as I said, its decent. With this and Minka’s two next novels, Cadian Honour, and Traitor Rock being collected in an omnibus soon, I think I might pick it up and see how she goes.

Collected into the Shield of the Emperor omnibus, Rebel Winter is about Sebastev, a Vostroyan First Born Captain and his struggle to keep his men alive while fighting both human rebels, and hordes of Orks. This is the third and final book in the omnibus and is accompanied by the short story The Citadel. Similar to Fifteen Hours, Rebel Winter begins in medius res, but instead of being our protagonists death, it is him about to go on trial for something, which we assume we will learn of through the story. We also have a few other characters to meet, such as the non-Vostroyan commissar and his companion who is secretly not firstborn, Rits, who is Sebastevs companion, and Sebastev’s commander, Kabanov. There are other characters who are named in the novel, but these are the main ones, but I cant really say anything about them. The commissar, Karif, is really just a commissar, and his companion, Stavin, took the place of his disabled firstborn brother in secret, but that’s all he has too. I cant really say anything about the others either, which is a shame, especially when the plot happening around these characters, I think, is quite a good one. As mentioned before, this book has our characters fighting Orks, and rebels on the same planet. And these aren’t chaos rebels either, their planet fell into an ice age, and when the Imperium didn’t send help, they declared independence. Then before the Imperium responded, Orks attacked too, so once they arrived there were two enemies to face. And in this story, the Orks feel like a major threat, even more so than in Fifteen Hours, which I already praised for its threatening Orks. Throughout the novel, our characters constantly need to run away due to the overwhelming number of them. I really like this. And speaking again of those rebels, that justification is actually really relieving, while they aren’t perfect, they do have their own commissars, it’s a nice thing to see non-imperial humans who aren’t chaos cultists. Our characters are even disgusted by a rebel commissar, even with one of our characters being a commissar himself, its just a nice bit of imperial hypocrisy which I love. Now a reader, such as myself, might imagine that this hypocrisy shown, and the relatively justified rebellion might be what causes our protagonist Sebastev to go on trial. Maybe he sympathises with them too much, or even outright joins them. Now this is spoilers, but that’s not what happens. He’s on trial because he cared too much about his soldiers. This could have been worked instead, but it isn’t ever really shown. I never felt like he was overly careful with his men, but rather just a regular careful, and amount that higher ups in the command structure probably would be fine with. He is also meant to be a stubborn character, multiple people say so throughout the novel, but this never really came across either, the closest being him getting annoyed about a nickname he doesn’t like. This, alongside the lack of character depth is what really stops this book from being great. But there are other small weird bits I want to mention. For some reason its never really indicated when we are reading a character’s thoughts. They aren’t italicized or anything, we’ll just go down a paragraph and be met half way through with a “he thought”. And while of course the story ends with the trial of our protagonist, it doesn’t actually, it ends with a transcription of an interrogation of a prisoner our characters pick up. I have no idea where this comes from, of course he would be interrogated, and maybe it could be interesting to see what information he gives up, but instead its just a weird plot twist that doesn’t really make sense as to why it happened. That’s all of the criticisms I had, but I lastly I just had to say that according to this book, squigs can be green and Orks can be brown. It doesn’t impact the story or anything, its just a weird thing I had to point out was in here. So yet again, the book is fine. It was a little better than Deathworld, but not nearly as good as Fifteen Hours. The book has an engaging opening, and good overall plot beats, but the characters we follow are just not interesting, and our endings don’t get the build-up they should have had. I might try reading it again, but I’ve got plenty of other things to read that I’d likely enjoy more.

Once more, there is a short story, The Citadel, I’ll mention it briefly here. The Citadel is kind of a prequel to the novel. It follows one of the other commanders reminiscing about when he first met one of the other commanders who died. I feel like this is a weird thing to be writing about with how the novel ended. There was setup for the story to continue, but this is what we get instead. On the whole its fine, if you’ve got it you may as well read it, but you can just skip it.

Collected into the Shield of the Emperor omnibus, Death World is about a Catachan Jungle Fighter and his squad sent on a mission to help fight Orks on a newly declared death world. This is the second book in the omnibus and is accompanied by the short story Better the Devil. We open the novel on Lorenzo, our protagonist complaining about struggling to sleep in space, and excitedly waiting to be deployed on Rogar III, a newly declared Death World. His squad gets sent on a mission to kill Big Green, the Ork’s warboss, and most of the book follows this squad with their Commissar. This squad is 12 men strong, and I feel we don’t have that much time to actually develop them all that much. They are kind of just stereotypical gruff soldiers in the style of those from Predator, and their stereotypical by the books commissar. Lorenzo is obsessed throughout the book with being given a nickname by his comrades for some kind of feat, a Catachan tradition. However sometimes it gets annoying and repetitive of him just being afraid of not getting one, or getting a bad one, but there are chunks of the book where we just completely forget about this. When he isn’t thinking about this though, we do get a few fun interactions between him and some of the squad members just being bros, which I quite like. The best part about the book would have to be how we see the world as a kind of horrific enemy itself that the Jungle Fighters have to adapt to. It’s kind of interesting to see the how the world operates and changes, even if there isn’t much detail about it. At the same time though, the Orks are kind of pushovers, sure they kill some characters, but they are also gunned down by the dozen, so they never felt like much of a threat. This isn’t a book ruining problem, it’s just disappointing to see them be so weak, especially after how they were portrayed in Fifteen Hours. In the end, the book is fine. I doubt I’ll ever read it again, but it wasn’t a pain to go through. After having read Fifteen Hours, I definitely felt a little disappointed, but maybe Rebel Winter, the next book in the omnibus will be better.

Once again, this book is accompanied by a short story, Better the Devil, and also once again, I’ll mention it briefly. Better the Devil is a prequel, showing Lorenzo’s fight with a Catachan devil that led to him being admitted into the jungle fighters. Honestly it was pretty much the same level of enjoyment as the actual novel. You don’t really gain much by reading it, but if you’ve got is you may as well.

Collected into the Shield of the Emperor omnibus, Fifteen Hours is about an Imperial Guardsmen deployed to his first battle, where the life expectancy is, as the title suggests, is 15 hours. This is the first book in the omnibus, and is accompanies by the short story Knee Deep, set immediately after the novel. The novel open in medias res, we see our protagonist bleeding to death in no-mans land wondering how many hours he’s been there. After this quite engaging opening, we cut back to our protagonist, Larn, getting conscripted, going to training, getting deployed, and eventually making it back to the death we knew would come. The journey to this ending is a somewhat depressing, yet also occasionally darkly funny adventure. We get to see the incompetence of Imperial bureaucracy throughout the novel, and always see how it comes around to impacting Larn and his comrades. Some chapters start with a few paragraphs from the perspective of a character we’ve never seen before, like an administratum serf, or an artillery officer, and the rest of the chapter afterwards we see how their actions effect our characters. All of this goes around to create an engaging story about struggling to survive not only the enemy orks, but also the Imperium’s incompetence as well. And speaking of the orks, I was glad to see that they are actually shown as a threat that our characters do not want to face, that many believe will kill them all. Its just a nice thing to see, a threatening xenos force in a novel. This is all not mentioning much about Larn himself. Larn is a nice character to learn about the Imperial Guard from. He starts off as a conscript who doesn’t know much but is hopeful and encouraged by propaganda. However as the novel goes on, and we meet more experienced guardsmen, his world collapses around him. It isn’t the exciting adventure to serve the God Emperor he expected, it’s a miserable one, and he'll die for no good reason on a planet no one knows about. I can’t say that there is much negative I have to say about the novel. Some characters could have some more development, but also many aren’t around for all that long, so its not all that important. And while the orks may be rather portrayed threateningly, they are still handled a little easier than it could have been, but the way it was handled was good regardless. This novel was honestly a joy to read. Larn is a great protagonist, especially for anyone who is looking to learn about the Imperial Guard. The journey shows us the miserable, dark life for the average human in the universe, while also hitting us with small bits of humour throughout that really bring the story up. Fifteen Hours would be a great first read for prospective 40k readers.

As I mentioned at the start of this review, there is a follow up short story called Knee Deep, which is also read of course, and will mention briefly here. Knee Deep takes place immediately after Fifteen Hours, following some surviving characters in the sewers looking for orks. They find them, and they kill them. There isn’t really much to this story, not much is added to our characters, and the orks don’t feel like as much of a threat. Its an ok story, not a necessary read, but if you’ve got the omnibus, you may as well read it.

Deliverance Lost follows the Raven Guard legion following the events at Isstvan V, and their attempts to rebuild the legion. As someone who decided to start playing the Horus Heresy with a Raven Guard army, I hoped this would be a good story to get an understanding of the legion and its characters, unfortunately I was mistaken. I’ll be honest, I don’t think there is anything I really liked about this book. None of the characters are particularly interesting, I don’t think I can actually describe a personality for most of them, and with who I can there is very little I can say. Alpharius is secretive, Omegon is duplicitous, Branne is somewhat investigative, and Corax is a bit emo, that’s all I can say about any of them though. Also, Alpharius isn’t actually Alpharius, he’s an Alpha Legion marine infiltrated into the Raven Guard and we don’t even find out the name of the person he replaced until the end of the novel. He is referred to as Alpharius throughout the book and no character says his name, until almost the end, from which point on he is called the other name, so I just question the point of calling him Alpharius in the first place. Now of course you should have characters with a bit of depth to them, but even if you don’t the novel could be alright if the plot was decent, but sadly it isn’t really. Very little happens in the first half of the book. We get a brief description of the Ravens Flight, the Raven Guards 98 day campaign on Isstvan V after the dropsite massacre, which is immediately followed by them all hanging out on space ships for multiple chapters not doing anything interesting. They make it back to Terra where nothing particularly interesting happens, we get a brief action scene there of marines fighting a labyrinth, and they win pretty easily. The go back to Deliverance, make more marines, fight some people we’ve not seen yet somewhere else, comeback to Deliverance, fight the antagonists we’ve been following the whole novel, win in one chapter, and then fight more enemies somewhere else we haven’t seen before and win in one chapter. Essentially, nothing happens for most of the novel, and at the end we get 3 separate action scenes, only one of which had any actual build up as we followed Omegon and the Mechanicum for maybe half of the novel. We could have just gotten 1 large action scene with them and end it there, instead we briefly see that, and get another brief fight with the Emperors Children protecting the Perfect Fortress, characters we only meet in the last chapter. This is quite a negative review, but I will say I do think that Gav is talented, just not especially as a writer, based on this and The First Wall. From what I have seen, he can come up with interesting events, I thought the concepts of rebuilding the Raven Guard, the Mechanicum uprising on Deliverance, and the battle for the Perfect Fortress were good. It would have been nice to see it written well, with build-up action and enjoyable characters, but in here it honestly reads like a Lexicanum article with dialogue occasionally.