The pacing of the beginning to middle was too slow. The dialogue was not great throughout. There were a lot of missed opportunities. The characters lacked the gravitas that the characters of the prior books had. Everything after endriago was pretty good. The prologue and epilogue were trash.

For a book that relished every detail, the change in the Lion near the end of the novel feels relatively unexplained. Spoilers: Particularly with attias and eliath like why do they deserve his scorn? Like I could zahariel and luther because he might've seen through the details they left out regarding the bomb, and although it seems a bit odd that he would admonish the forces that just saved his life by sending israfel to caliban especially considering that israfel is not a calabinite I can see the line of reason, but are attias and eliath just in trouble because they are friends with zahariel? Why is nemiel still in favor? What happened to all the good will that the lion had for zahariel prior? Is this intended to be the mystery at the end of the book? If it is explained later in the series and this was all intentional that i fell hook line and sinker for then I will change my review to 5 stars.

So I’m sure you’ll see the reviews saying this is unnecessary, but this is the first book in the series to really delve into what life was like on a Pre-imperium world, and not just any, but one that a Primarch was on. Getting to see how The Lion rises to prominence, what it’s like for humans, the Emperor himself makes an appearance, which frankly I’d read an entire book just because he shows up. You see the foundations of important players later on, so it’s a lot of groundwork, personally I view it as well worth it. Also SPOILERS This is the first sign of Tzeentch in the Horus Heresy series, we’ve had Nurgle and Slaanesh, now I’m curious how long before Khorne happens (first time reader here)

This story was listed as next in the series of the Horus Heresy. It has NOTHING to do with that. I forced myself almost halfway through this D&D adventure before giving up. Not only did it not extend the ongoing storyline of the previous books in the HH series, it actually acted as a circuit breaker, taking me completely out of the ongoing storyline without giving me anything in return. Oh, and it's badly written as well, a walking catalogue of philosophizing monologues, flat dialog, and cliched "action" segments. This really and truly has nothing to do with the HH and very, very little to do with WH40K.

Terrible

I have read nearly every single 40k book black library has released in the past 10-15 years. And I must say, both of the dark angels books in the horus heresy series were two of the most dissappointing. It was well written, and the second time I read them I liked them a LITTLE more than the first time, but they were far from the best. Most of the events of this book take place before the emperor even arrives on the planet and meets his son, so a vast majority of the book is battles with essentially industrial weaponry, though tword the end in really gets more into the 40k universe. I was very disappointed with these 2 books, regardless.