Category Archives: Black Library

QUICK REVIEW: The Tyrant’s Champion – SP Cawkwell

It’s good to see Sarah Cawkwell back on the Black Library radar after a fairly quiet year in 2013. The Tyrant’s Champion, her latest short story, returns us to the world of Huron Blackheart and his Red Corsairs, pretty much following on from the events of The Gildar Rift. Blackheart was the antagonist in that novel, providing a good mixture of moustache-twirling criminal mastermind and scary, anger-fuelled power maniac. As the title suggests however, this new story is concerned with his champion, or rather the selection of a new one after the last one met a sticky end at the hands of the Silver Skulls.

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Straken – Toby Frost

SHORT REVIEW :

For readers who know the 40k background and hold a special place in their heart for the classic Imperial Guard special characters, the appeal of this book can basically be summarised in three names : ‘Iron Hand’ Straken, Nork Deddog and ‘Sly’ Marbo. If those names mean anything to you, you’ll be heading out to get this book right away, and you won’t be disappointed.

LONG REVIEW :

In his first novel for Black Library, Toby Frost – author of the entertaining Space Captain Smith series, tackles the Imperial Guard, specifically the Catachan 2nd regiment. A staple of the Imperial Guard on the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop, this characterful regiment of jungle fighters has been strangely under-represented by Black Library in the past. No longer, however. Straken bursts out of the page from the get go and hits the ground running, the first alien gribbly receiving the shotgun-to-the-face treatment within three pages. You know straight away that this is going to be about Catachans going toe-to-toe with whatever the galaxy throws at them, which is exactly as it should be.

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