Thom

This novel didn't really leave a strong impression on me. It can be fairly well summed up as just ‘another Black Library novel' without a huge amount to distinguish it. Perfectly enjoyable, but certainly not a classic of the genre.

The book was released along with the refresh of the Krieg for the game Kill Team, which might help account for its middle-of-the-road nature. I've found many of the direct product tie-in novels to be pretty generic, perhaps there is something about the way these books get commissioned that means the authors are a bit more prone to phoning it in, I don't know.

The basic plot line follows two different timelines. One tells the origin story of the Death Corps of Krieg as they fight a long and bloody war on their home planet against a rebelling planetary governor. In the other timeline, the Krieg come to help an army of Cadians fighting to retake a hive city infested with orks. Both stories are fine, although the first is far more compelling in my opinion. But I kept expecting to find the stories crossing over and wasn't really sure why they didn't. It ends up feeling like two shorter books stuck together. I didn't find the plot brought many surprises either, and none of the characters were especially standout or memorable.

I don't want to sound too negative, as I did enjoy the book. If you like Warhammer 40,000 novels in general - and I love them - then there is plenty to enjoy here: great action sequences, classic 40k over-the-top-ness, and a focus on a fan-favorite regiment of the Imperial Guard. I think, though, there are just better books out there, and if you haven't read them already, for some Imperial Guard action I'd definitely point readers towards the Gaunt's Ghosts series or Honourbound before this book.

Classic Warhammer 40k Black Library fair.

When the Iron Warriors fall on an impregnable fortress surrounded by a radio-active desert, it is up to a battalion of Imperial Guardsmen and a small cadre of Imperial Fist space marines to try to hold their bastion against the galaxy's best siege breakers, all the while battling duplicitous priests of Mars and trying to discover why the Iron Warriors would come to such a backwater planet in such numbers. Can they hold the line, or will they be swept away by the storm of Iron?

There isn't anything subtle or particularly imaginative about Storm of Iron. But, it is classic Black Library - lots of explosions, gore, death and grim-dark. It is a bit of a classic though, one of the earlier novels and it still holds up well if you like this sort of thing. This is not a clever book, the plot is extremely linear and the characters are generally painted in primary colours. This is the kind of book where you know what you are getting and that is exactly what you get. If that is what you wanted in the first place, then great.

For that reason, I Would not necessarily recommend it to someone who was new to the universe, or to pulp sci-fi in general. But, definitely recommended for any Iron Warriors fans, and it is a solid entry if you already know you love Warhammer 40k novels.

“Thank you,” I said, genuinely sad for her when I thought of all the heartbreak ahead of her— all the phalluses just waiting to be drawn in the dust on the windshield of her future. I wanted to tell her to run. To save herself while she still could. But I had been about the same age when I'd fallen for Steven, and if anyone had told me he'd turn out to be a philandering creep, I never would have believed them.'

It is hard to sum up how much I love this book. For me, this is the perfect comedy novel. There were moments where I didn't want to turn the page because I knew what was about to happen and it was making me cringe too hard (but in the best possible way).

If the setup doesn't swing you, I don't think we can be friends: Finlay is the author of romantic mystery novels and a newly single mother of two young kids, struggling to keep her house afloat and meet her agent's deadlines. At lunch with her agent, in disguise because she's been banned from the establishment for throwing soup on her ex's new girlfriend - she is mistaken for a hit-woman and accidentally hired to kill this woman's husband. Things get worse when she accidentally fulfills the hit! Now, she has a bag of dirty money, and a dead body, and still needs to finish that novel. What's worse, she finds herself in a love triangle with a hot cop Nick, and a trainee lawyer/sexy bartender Julian. Can Finlay finish her novel, stop her husband from taking custody of the kids, work out her feelings, and - ideally, obviously - not go to jail for murder?

This novel is just full of hijinks, Finlay spends most of the book trying desperately to get out of one tight corner only to box herself into an even tighter one. Each time, you can see the car crash coming and you just want to scream at Finlay to stop! It is delicious and hilarious and the romance is enthralling as well. One of my favorite books of the year.

Describing the distribution of wealth, Katharina Pistor likens the graphical representation to an elephant's head: “The broad forehead holds 50 percent of the world's population; over the past 35 years they captured a paltry 12 percent of growth in global wealth. From the forehead a curve leads down toward the trunk and from there, steeply up to the raised tip. The trunk is where “the one percent” sit; they hold 27 percent of the new wealth, more than double the amount held by the people clustered together on the elephant's forehead. The valley between the forehead and the trunk is where lower-income families in the advanced Western market economies are bundled together, the “squeezed bottom 90 percent” of these economies.”

The Code of Capital seeks to underscore the role that legal structures play in establishing and perpetuating this massively unequal distribution of wealth in today's world. Pistor argues that we can't properly understand inequality without understanding key legal structures - most importantly, the body corporate.

In Pistor's account, there are two key legal processes that occur. The first is to take something of value and transform it into an asset. This is done by giving it the attributes of priority rights (meaning the ability to assert one's control over it), durability, universality (meaning it is recognised widely as an asset), and liquidity (meaning it can be turned into fiat currency reliably). Secondly, these assets are owned by companies that are legally constructed to shield their owners from risk, shift losses away from owners, and can persist indefinitely.

Through these two sets of legal processes, value can be turned into a maximally profitable asset and held in such a way that it acrews to the very rich with minimal risk of losses being sustained and very little way for those assets to be taken away from them.

Pistor supplements this core analysis with plenty of examples and some great legal economic history. She also shows how powerful and wealthy people are able to use their wealth to further change the legal rules to sure up their position, creating a sort of negative flywheel effect whereby they become ever more entrenched in their wealth and accrue ever greater portions of new wealth to themselves.

I think this is a fascinating book and a great read for anyone seeking to understand the modern global economy. Well worth a read. I'd suggest pairing it with something like Martin Wolf's ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism' as I think these together make for a good layman's explainer on some of the causes and effects of our increasingly staggering levels of global inequality.

Published to go alongside the launch of the new edition of Warhammer 40,000 and its special edition launch box, Leviathan, one can imagine the author had to work within some pretty tight commercial constraints. Nevertheless, this is a totally solid and fairly enjoyable 40K novel.

Garrisoning the world of Regium,Space Marines of the Ultramarine chapter spot an approaching Tyranid splinter fleet. The novel charts their desperate attempt to steam the unstoppable tide of the Great Devourer.

This is a very standard Black Library affair, lots of gore, lots of action, multiple perspectives and plenty of epic heroism from the boys in blue. Generally, I'd say it's a solid book, not much particularly remarkable but definitely not boring and the plot feels engaging and fairly satisfying. I do want to give a special shout to two civilian characters who we meet trying to escape the death of their planet, I actually really loved these two and found that I was really rooting for them to survive. I think BL books very rarely make you feel anything for the characters, so this was a great little side plot within the novel.

Overall, if you are a BL fan and want to get hyped for the new edition, this book will deliver.