Book Review: Emperor's Finest

Man I love Ciaphas Cain. If someone had told me before I read For the Emperor, that someone would be able to write a comic take of the Grim Dark of 40k, I would have thought it was doomed to failure. And then Ciaphas Cain came into my life, and the Grim Dark changed.

This book is out of order with the other books (it would kind of have to be after "Cain's Last Stand" taking place technically after Ciaphas retires) and that was a little bit weird for me because there were certain things that the readers knew, but Cain himself didn't know as the action was taking place, but thankfully, as with all the Cain books, we have the footnotes written by Amberly Vail.

Cain has been assigned as an Liason officer to the Reclaimers space marines chapter. I guess he figured with the biggest, baddest bad asses in the galaxy surrounding him, he should be pretty safe.

Silly Caiphas, you should have known better than that. Cain deals almost exclusively with genestealers in this book, and while we've seen him deal with Tyranids before, seeing him tool around a space hulk with terminators was kind of different.

One of the things I really didn't like was that what I like to call, prologue of this book took too long. We were thrown into the action pretty quickly, but the action seemed pretty distant from the meat of the book in my opinion. By the time we got to the real deal, the book was half way over, and that made me a little sad.

That being said, the action in the space hulk itself is pretty awesome. As per usual, Cain is doing whatever he can think of to save his skin, and still not look like he is a chicken. These actions, as per usual, throw him into more trouble than he could have imagined.

One of the sub-plots I really enjoyed with Cain dealing with the most insideous threat he has ever faced. A woman whose mission is to marry him. The sheer panic that Cain feels when he realizes her plans is great!

The last little downer in this book is the ending. It is sorta anti-climatic. It littlerly went from full in-your-face action to, "the book is over," and it felt as if the author had reached his word limit and needed to end the story. I was a little sad by that. 

All-in-all not a bad story, but one of the weakest Cain novels in my opinion. Although I still give this story three Ork/Genestealer hybrids out of five.