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.

Caves of Ice

This book is the second novel in Sandy Mitchell's Caiaphas Cain series. In it our cowardly hero winds up struggling to survive on a winter planet trapped between an invading horse of orks and an awakening army of necrons. As with the first book in the omnibus there's a short story preceding it, this one called Echoes of the Tomb, in which Cain encounters yet more necrons thanks to the short-sighted lust for archaic tech of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Stand by for post about book three, in which I'll give some fuller reflections on the series as a whole.*

* What I've read of it, that is. I have no plans to read past book three - I'm enjoying them but I've got lots of other stuff to be reading & frankly I'm running out of shelf space.

For the Emperor

This book is the first of three in the first* omnibus collection of Ciaphas Cain stories by Sandy Mitchell - I'm reviewing each novel in the omnibus in a separate post as that only seems fair (and boosts my numbers for blog purposes).  As I do with all series, I'll do brief posts for the first couple and then a longer more reflective post once I've finished this introductory trilogy.

   Alongside the titular novel is a prelude short story called Fight or Flight, in which we are first introduced to Cain (a commissar whose dazzlingly heroic reputation is very much at odds with the reality of his character as a cunning coward who just wants a quiet life with as little mortal danger as possible - however life in the Imperial Guard never seems to quite grant him this - an amusing subversion of the genuinely heroic nature of most other famous commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 universe**) as he is introduced to his new placement with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, assigned a smelly aide called Jurgen, and narrowly avoids being consumed by a tyranid incursion.

   The novel itself picks up a few years later, as Cain is newly placed as commissar to the amalgamated mixed-gender regiment of the Valhallan 597th and sent to the remote backwater world Gravalax where Imperial citizens have been trading, heretically, with the Tau Empire. War over such an insignificant planet is not deemed worthwhile by the Guard so this mission is, at first at least, primarily diplomatic; wanting the humans to stop, or at minimum reduce, their problematic relations with the alien races, in such a way as to avoid violence (all of which is very much fine by Cain) - a goal set straight from the Inquisition itself. However events conspire as to raise the stakes, and Cain finds himself at the heart of a shambolic mess of risk-whichever-way-you-turn, only for things to get less confusing but even worse safety-wise when a genestealer cult is discovered who have manipulating developments from underground (quite literally - the second half of this novel largely takes place in a tunnel complex). The resolution is more of matter of muddled luck than anything authentically courageous or clever, which I suspect is par for the course in this particular commissar's career. I look forward to the next instalment.

* At time of writing there are ten Ciaphas Cain novels and many short stories out, and while I have no doubt I would enjoy reading them they're very low down my priority list given how much else I have to read - within the same universe I'm going back to my focus on the Horus Heresy.

** Looking specifically at you, Ibram Gaunt. And I suppose Yarrick.