"Angel Exterminatus"

Angel Exterminatus (Graham McNeill)

I'm a little worried when starting a Graham McNeill book now; His books can be great (A Thousand Sons), mediocre and pointless (The Outcast Dead), or infuriatingly terrible (Priests of Mars). The knocks on McNeill are that he introduces too many groups of characters and that he doesn't know how to write an ending, and I admit that as I got closer and closer to the back cover of this book, I was becoming increasingly worried about how McNeill was going to wrap everything up.
Happily, McNeill pulls it off in style. There is one small cliffhanger at the ending, and one pointless group of side-characters (an insane doctor making twisted Space Marine mutants), but these are minor nitpicks in a quite enjoyable novel. The plot centers around Peturabo, from the Iron Warriors (and yes, there's a cute tie-in with the Iron Warriors Omnibus), who is taken along on a quest with Fulgrim, from the Emperor's Children. Fulgrim here is a very pleasant surprise, emerging as the book's most fleshed-out and entertaining character  and also being rehabilitated from the terrible treatment he was given in the novel named after him. (All the more puzzling since McNeill himself also wrote that book!)
As well as Fulgrim is written, Peturabo is no slouch either, and it's quite enjoyable to watch the two bounce off each other in the novel's first half. The second half is quite a lot of action, ably assisted by the first half's stage setting, and as a whole the result is one of the better Horus Heresy novels, falling in the good-but-not-quite great tier, and quite easy to recommend to W40K fans. (Non-fans will be even more lost than usual, unfortunately.) I hope this is a return to form for McNeill, and if not, at least it's another bright spot in his body of work.

Grade: A-