Grim Repast
3.0 Stars
8-15-2025

A rough-hewn novel, but it stuck the landing and so I ended up liking it by the finish. This story takes place a few tiers down from the usual WH40K story, with the MC being a street level detective. It leans heavily into the noir; the main character is beaten and scarred up, worn down by the job, the administration, the corruption, and the relentless cold of being a minor pawn in a mega-city on a slowly dying ice world. You will notice that in the previous sentence, I "told" rather than "showed" what the MC's life is like. The author likes doing that too, it is apparently something they teach at WH40K writing school. Large portions of the start of the book involve the author batting you about the head with statements about what the setting is, rather than showing you what the setting is. There are several points in this book where someone is beaten with a heavy-caliber pistol, and as a reader you get that experience too, as the author belabors his points with dozens and dozens and dozens of lines of gruff noir stylings.

But. Despite the clumsiness, the first two thirds of the book have enough interesting tidbits to keep things moving. I liked that this book has an inordinate amount of lore; just based on the setting and the extensive back stories and previous cases that are referenced I assumed this was the second book in the series. Nope! This is actually the first book in the series (plus one brief prequel short story), but the world has been built out enough that I assumed that it was the second book. I also liked the mentor's notebook; the MC's mentor served in the same role as him, but the decades of exposure to the worst of the city's crimes gradually drove his mentor stark raving mad. The MC though still has his mentor's hundreds of casebooks, and they act as a sort of Tome of the Damned, something that can be delved into for information and inspiration, but also something that probably isn't good for your long term sanity. I thought it was a neat and well-grounded-in-the-story example of a cursed artifact. Speaking of inspiration, the MC is also a very-low-level psyker, giving him a sort of Poker Face like insight into the immediate reactions of people. It's a small enough talent, but it is enough to give him an edge in his cases as well as make him suspicious and odd to most of his co-workers. (small side note; I like how this is not an ability that the MC uses, but rather an intrusive knowledge/belief that is forced upon him. It is frequently unpleasant, and he's not even 100% sure this is an actual talent rather than just a minor mental illness.) Anyway, those are the highlights of the first 70% of the novel. The low lights include a case that doesn't make that much sense, character actions that don't go anywhere, and just a general lack of actual detectiving. It has the beats of a noir detective story, but they don't really hang together into a cohesive plotline. In the last section though the story picks up, kicking off with a really fun and extended and extensively creepy interview with a very low level cannibal cultist. From there things just continue to escalate, and it has a action-horror movie energy where things just keep getting more and more dire to the point of giddiness. It's a great way to end a novel, and also does a great job of making the reader feel just how absolutely fucked it would be, as a normal person, to have to confront the kind of numinous evil that is tossed off so lightly in so many other WH40K novels.