Let's Read the Horus Heresy 13: Nemesis

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember.

 - The Horus Heresy: Nemesis, James Swallow

This one's by James Swallow, who also did Flight of the Eisenstein, which I liked. Nemesis tracks a team of assassins sent to kill Horus, and a murder investigation on an Imperial world. It's quite good.

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Like so many scifi novels, Nemesis has two plots that initially start out completely separate from each other, but obviously the reader knows that they'll eventually meet. This requires some faith in a author, and I remember giving up on Peter F. Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction when he introduced what felt like the twentieth separate and unconnected plot. Nemesis also requires a little bit of faith when one plotline is an Execution Force of Imperial assassins working up to murder the Warmaster, and the other is a detective story that seems to have nothing at all to do with it.

It's worth it, though. The Assassinorum plotline is a very classic one where they assemble a team of dysfunctional individualists to do an apparently impossible mission. You've seen the movie, you've played the video game, you know how this goes. But it's competently done and enjoyable; as with Eisenstein, Swallow writes a good Warhammer thriller. Oddly enough I think the experience is enhanced by the fact that if you know anything at all about the Horus Heresy, you know they won't be successful.

I also really liked the police procedural plotline. The Horus Heresy books are so focused on the space marines that it's just good to read a story where for something like 90% of the time there isn't a suit of power armor to be seen. The way the two stories link up is actually interesting enough that I'll just say that I thought this was a very good Horus Heresy book and leave it at that.

Something Nemesis has in common with Eisenstein is that in both books, Rogal Dorn is a complete moron. Here he tries to pick a totally pointless fight with the Custodes and is just generally an ass. I'm coming around to the idea that one way to look at the Horus Heresy is that the whole Primarch project was just a really bad idea.

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So anyway, I liked Nemesis. And speaking of Primarchs and really bad ideas, next up, it's Lorgar.