I have really been impressed lately with the action "scenes" in a lot of BL books (40k and Fantasy), and this book is just as good. The battles were pretty epic, even when it was just a skirmish. The only thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the space battle was glossed over, but this was a pretty beefy book, so a chapter or two of space battle missing isn't too bad.


My major pet peeve of having too many plots and characters going on at one time was thankfully absent in this book. There were quite a few characters, but they mostly revolved around different parts of two major plots. For me this was good because I got a bit of the "oh my god this is good, I can't wait to get back to it in the next chapter," but I didn't get the, "OK, now I have to remember what this character was doing 200 pages, and 15 sub-plots ago."


Another thing that was thankfully missing was the "uber-evil imperial guy" that is just there to make the lives of the major characters more of a PITA. There was one dude in the story that I thought was going to shape up into one of those characters, but it didn't turn out that way. Thank you Mr. Parker!

With prior knowledge of that fact that the Crimson Fists were going to get mauled in this book, it made me hesitant to cheer for characters, but I knew that many of them were gunna be blowed up, and this was the case. I actually think this was a good thing in the book because every time a new and interesting character was introduce, I was like, "Oh no! I hope he doesn't die!" Another thing I liked was that Mr. Parker did in fact kill off some of those likeable characters you were just getting to know. It made it feel real. It made it feel as if the Crimson Fists were well and truly boned.

A couple of the things I didn't like about the book were the distain that many of the Space Marines felt towards the humans that they were fighting for. There are some circumstances that do come up in the book that explain it, but it was the differences between that different Astartes that really made me stop and blink before continuing.

The last thing that sorta stuck in my craw was the fact that we saw Space Marines in this book had a stat line that was roughly, in my opinion, BS 7 WS 7 S8 T8 W10 I6 A8 Ld 11 Sv 1+. Regular tactical marines were ambushed by Orks and killed every ork without taking a casualty, there were fights were you would think SOMEONE is gunna bite it, but no one does. Now I understand why this is written this way. It's a Space Marines novel, so we want them to be heroic. We want them to stand against the Green Tide and never give up, but there were a couple of occasions where it was a bit unbelievable, even for Space Marines.

Overall this was an excellent book. I would encourage anyone to read it. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!