Book Review: Deliverance Lost

The latest in the Horus Heresy books makes me think fondly of some of the older HH novels.

One of the things I really really liked about some of the first HH novels was background information about the primarchs and the founding of their legions and how the Heresy effected them. We saw this in books like Decent of Angles, Fulgrim, and later in The First Heretic, these books have been some of the finest in my opinion.

One of the trickiest things about this book is that it is a sequel to Raven's Flight, and I am not sure if as many people listen to the audio books as the written books. The good news is that Gav Thorpe does a good job of filling in some of the gaps. You may not know exactly what is going on with Marcus Valerius' dreams, but we know he had them, and that they ultimately led him to go bail our Corax.

This book picks up at the end of Raven's Flight, and at the end of the Istavaan V massacre. The Ravens are fleeing the Istavaan system, and Corax is hoping that his father can help him rebuild his shattered legion after he leave 75,000 dead battle brothers on Istavaan.

The problem is that the Alpha Legion, tricky bastards that they are, have something planned for the Ravens and the Imperium. This is kind of cool because it explains one of the rather odd occurances at the end of Raven's Flight, and this leads to a very good sub-plot of the story, an infiltrator trying to blend in with those who are his enemies even though he is gaining more respect for them as he sees how they deal with the situation they find themselves in.

As I said, this is a good book, there is a lot of action, and it does drive the story head, although I did have some issues with the major plot line of the story. They weren't major issues, but there were some things that confused me about it and didn't really seem to make sense to me.

In the end, I think the title of the book lives up to the story, and it is a tragic story that doesn't end well for anyone (I guess the universe is getting more and more grim and dark).

I give this book four transhumans out of five.