Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies: Choose Your Enemies (Volume 10)

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They're both well written, excellently paced and brilliantly described, but the supporting cast elevates the tale to a new level. The ability for the narrative to interject accounts from other sources was always a major plus within prior tales, but here it is used to far more effectively flesh out the world. Speaking of unreliable narrator Ameberly's endnotes where just perfect, they added another dimension and while I normally don't like reading endnotes and "extras" I highly recommend you don't skip these!

In any case, all of the Cain stories are written as memoirs of a self-loathing hero, who is convinced he is nothing more than a craven coward. Imagine having three life-coaches who had been through the toughest mental and physical challenges; a crack team of problem-solvers who knew in their day job that one mistake could be the difference between life - and death.When an event occurs, how it occurs, what drives the protagonist onward, how important something is to the overarching plot; that sort of thing. Part of this might be down to some surprisingly odd actions by the races involved in the story, but also how everything is instantly resolved. What I wasn't prepared for was one of the few novels where the eldar are presented as competent and where an Avatar of Khaine actually carries its weight, and more, in battle. It's not hard to see why - Cain is Blackadder meets Flashman, with all the snark and intelligent humour involved applied to M41. Though with an eleventh novel, Vainglorious, recently announced, it looks like Cain is back at full steam.

While one or two excellent ones - especially just as Cain discovers just what the enemy's plan is - which work in its favour, there are far fewer here to compliment the overall humour. Now Caine delves into the real stories behind the gangs we think we know so well, revealing the hidden realities behind the myths. While it disguised this well for some time, toward start of the third trilogy these problems became much more obvious.However, when it gets away from that area it tends to lack the innate descriptive strengths or narrative of more conventional stories.

One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat. As always, there are hints alerting the careful reader as to what is really going in, but as the memoirs are, if not quite stream of consciousness, definitely overwhelmingly cast in Cain's personality, it's easy enough to miss those hints (as Cain does). Yet atop of everything else, Choose Your Enemies manages to sidestep a fair few of the pacing issues and structural problems inherent in the overall series. The way the story manages to execute a better pace is by working around a lot of the flab present in past stories.Someone probably should have mentioned that to the Black Library folks at GW, since I imagine the omnibuses get hit with a lot of flack as a result. Then there’s Inquisitor Vale’s footnotes, which dance between pointing out people’s foibles, and wondering if Cain isn’t the precise man the Imperium needs.