Pariah, spy and Inquisitorial agent, Alizebeth Bequin is all of these things and yet none of them. In the city of Queen Mab, nothing is quite as it seems. It’s the same universe but seen through different eyes and I can see that adding a refreshing twist to familiar surroundings, especially when Abnett gets going with some of the more intricate ‘ins and outs’ of the plot.īut I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit, here’s the blurb…

However, the adoption of a new point of view character, as the lead, makes this a book that anyone should be able to pick up and get into fairly quickly. ‘Pariah’ does make reference to earlier events, something fans should get a lot out of as it continues on from the last two trilogies.

At a mere three hundred and seventeen pages long the book sits comfortably in the hand and the blurb suggested something sufficiently ‘stand alone’ that I could get into quickly. ‘Pariah’ though, that’s a different story. That, in turn, has led to my never checking out the ‘Ravenor’ omnibus either. I’ve always meant to pick up the ‘Eisenhorn’ books but have been put off by the size of the omnibus edition (not a practical commuter read for me). Click Here, Here, Here and Here to see what I mean. Long term readers here will know that Abnett has serious form for writing top notch novels set in the Warhammer 40K universe. It was good then that the other book I’d been reading, at the same time as ‘Dark Vengeance’, was Dan Abnett’s ‘Pariah’. Black Library books usually concentrate on the setting and, for the most part, they do it very well. What really bothered me about this approach, in ‘Dark Vengeance’, is that Black Library usually deliberately avoid it in their other books preferring to actually tell a tale rather than use the book as something else that you should buy with the game. Go and have a read if you like, I’ll still be here when you get back o) If you weren’t here yesterday, I’m not going to link to the post in question because that post is right under this one. If you were about yesterday then you will have seen me going on about how it can kill things, just a little bit, when a tie-in novel makes a big deal about how it’s tying in with a game rather than just concentrating on telling a tale.

Eisenhorn ravenor