Books in Brief : Death of Integrity by Guy Haley

I've been looking forward to getting hold of this since I learned of it as a work in progress about a year ago and as soon as it dropped I finished it off in short order. Having waited 25 years for a Blood Drinker novel, there was no way it was going to see a bookshelf until the very last page had been turned. So grab a 'brew' and pull up a chair for another not so brief book review.

Death of Integrity is the latest in the Space Marine Battles series, a series I must confess to having not read anything from previously, something I will now have to rectify; it's also only my second foray into works by the author Guy Haley. The first being his short story The Rite of Holos which featured in Hammer & Bolter last year and is now available as an eBook. I covered 'Rite' very briefly in a post back then, a cracking little read of its own and also a prequel to DoI.

If you're a regular visitor to this Blog you'll know that the Blood Drinkers have been my chosen Chapter since I first got into 40k all those decades ago, you'll also be aware that I have written extensively about their existing cannon background and generated a huge amount of my own material to fill in the blanks as it were. This makes me a harsh critic indeed, you only need look at the roasting James Swallow's Blood Angels books endure at my hand and the Angels are only cousins to the Drinkers.

Suffice to say Guy had his work cut out, he'd shown real promise with the short story, now expectations were doubly high; would he, could he deliver?

UK Games Day 2013 : Pt II Forge World Seminar

Lagging even further behind the rest of my fellow Bloggers reporting the Games Day news, the Forge World seminar has been pretty comprehensively covered; but I hate not completing a mission and lets face it posts have been a rare thing on the 'Edge this year. So for what it's worth here is what I scribbled down during the very entertaining briefing by Tony Cottrell & Alan Bligh, along with some more pictures from the Battle of Phall diorama (The taking of the Contrador), oh and some miniature provisionally called Primarch Number 5, wonder who that could be?

UK Games Day 2013 : Pt I Forge World

So in the vast desert of my Hobby time an Oasis appeared on the horizon (probably the first and only time Birmingham has been described as such) and I was able to bask in it's bounty of 40k goodness. 

That's right, I'm pleased to report that yours truly managed to successfully navigate Spaghetti Junction to attend this years UK Games Day; enabling me to top up my rather frayed Hobby Karma and continue what has been a very popular series of posts from the event, every year since this Blogs creation back in 2010.