Book Review: Chapter's Due

Well the other night I finally finished the latest Ultramarines book, Chapter's Due. I bought it when it first came out in paperback, but I was hesitant because I wasn't very happy with the last book.

Imagine my surprise when this book turned out to be really good! This is pretty much the end of the story arc that was started in 2002 with Storm of Iron. This is the ultimate battle between Ultramarines 4th Company Captain Uriel Ventris and the Iron Warriors Warmaster Honsou.

I was really a little bit worried as I read this book because it felt from the beginning as if this was to be the ultimate show down between Honsou and Ventris. And I really didn't know who to root fore. I like Honsou better than I like Ventris (he is a smurf after all), but I knew that the Ultramarines couldn't lose this fight. The author did a good job with making both characters shine.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that it was more than just Ventris/Honsou book. We see other characters I've read before such as Sicarius of the 2nd and some of his Sergents, as well as Marnius Calgar and Varro Tigerius.

This book was just full of action, and it was a nice change of pace from some of the Ultramarines books. I'm not saying the others were terrible, but every once in a while I like a pure fighty book.

I think Mr. McNeill did a very good job of taking characters that I last read from Nick Kyme in Fall of Damnos and making a fairly flawless transition between the books. If I hadn't known better, I wouldn't have known that two different writers had written these sets of characters.

In the end this book did have finality, but still left it open for more books in the future. It was a very good end to this story arc. I give this book four Chaos Space Marines scaling the wall of a cliff in power armor, out of five.