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It's good, but very much the standard cain story.

Trazyns a good character but the book suffers whenever he isn't around. It also suffers when the author clearly has to spend more time referencing the rest of the 40k universe than is necessary to tell his plot. As usual it can't be mutants it has to be something they can copyright.

Jack Vance destroys genre conventions and tells a set of delightful tales about self interested humans at the end of time.

McNeill struggles to maintain the tone and pace of the first novel. Character ideals and motivations seemingly change out of nowhere. Marines from other legions and the LW who had personality and context in the first book suddenly exist only as plot devices.

Indeed the whole matter of the betrayal to chaos is suddenly escalated. The novel begins slowly and then starts teleporting around to a greater extent. And the same is done towards the end, Horus is able to convert multiple other Primarchs to chaos completely in the background while the heroes, whittled down to 2, are mostly none the wiser.

I cannot recommend this book for any reason except HH completeness. My overall feeling is that McNeill believed Abnett strayed too far from canon and sought to bring this book into compliance by any means necessary.

I cannot help but compare this book to my favorite Dan Abnett story, Embedded. There is a similar story here, Abnett uses human journalists as point of view characters to investigate the Astartes. However, the execution falls somewhat flat. The heavy weight of 40k lore prevents the journalists from getting too close to the action, and it also prevents Abnett from innovating as far as he clearly wanted to with the almost really cool antagonists he created for this book.

Awful. Just the worst thing I have ever read. Hands down. I think I read that this was written for the Author's son as a bonding exercise, and that's fantastic just dont show it to other people please and thankyou.