the Traitor's Hand

This book is the third Caiaphas Cain novel by Sandy Mitchell. It is preceded by a short story titled The Beguiling, in which Cain and a ragtag team of his underlings get embroiled between Nurgle-cult & Slaanesh-cult shenanigans; then in the novel proper we have much more Slaanesh-cult shenanigans with a bit of Khorne thrown in at the end to spice things up.

   That's all you're getting on the plot itself, as this is the final post about this series that I foresee doing on this blog which means it's time for me to crack out a honest can of opinionated bloviation about the characters, themes, successes & failures of this omnibus insofar as I assume it represents the [over ten books] fuller series. My main takeaways are thus:

• Sandy Mitchell is good at being funny. While the Gaunt's Ghosts series does have its moments of levity, and whole comedy novels have been put out by the Black Library, overall the grimdark nature of Warhammer 40,000 as a setting does not lend itself to making you laugh, primarily. But here we are shown a relatively reliable means of doing so.
• Caiaphas Cain narrating in first-person is a nice change from every other Warhammer 40,000 novel I've read; it makes the tension more visceral and the character interactions/situations more immersive.
• Cain being, effectively, a lazy coward who wants nothing more than to be able to keep being respected as a commissar without ever having to do anything difficult or dangerous, is such a good premise. The setting is full of paint-by-numbers heroism; the shambling accidents by which Cain "saves the day" [i.e. survives with a bonus prize] make for extremely unpredictable storytelling, which I really enjoyed.
• Because the novels are in first-person but deal with things like planetary-scale warfare which is obviously better suited to third, Mitchell has made the genius editorial decision to frame each of these books as curated snippets from an autobiographical text file Cain himself was working on; where he misses out on certain pertinent details because he wasn't there or didn't care or both we have an entertaining sporadic slew of intermission chapters and asterisky footnotes filling in the gaps. This adds an excellent dimension of depth & distance to the text as the additions are being made by one Amberley Vail, an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, who personally crops up in these stories herself a few times.

   That's it I think. Funny Commissar, exciting action, Jurgen smells. Recommended for those whose interest has been piqued by the Warhammer 40,000 universe but have hithertofore found it Too grimdark to enjoy.