Enforcer

Excellent introduction to items not normally explored in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, including the Ecclesiarchy, Rogue Traders, and an in-depth look into the wierdness involved with the transmission of data via sanctioned psykers from planet to planet. Where the story doesn't hold up sometimes in terms of detective stories (though it ultimately comes across as a hard-boiled-detective-in-the-Warhammer-40,000-universe style story), it makes up in action. This is a great way to look into the daily lives of normal people living in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, as seen through the lens of the Adeptus Arbites. Just as with the Inquisition-focused storylines, you get to see something other than the ubermenschen Space Marines (not that they aren't fantastic as well), and return back to the chaos and mayhem caused by simple human greed. A good read. Strange, considering I'd never heard of Matt Farrer and he'd produced a trilogy!

Excellent character! This book should have been called an omnibus as it is a a compilation of three separate novels. If you do not want to buy the three separate novels then by all means purchase this version instead. Plenty of action and plot twists. Hard to put this novel down.

I would not recommend this be anyone's first exposure to the WH40K universe as it assumes the reader has knowledge of the world in general and the Adeptus Arbites in particular. (I made that mistake, but got enough information from the Dark Heresy RPG book to make sense of it.) The first and third books and short stories contained in Enforcer are a good look at how dark and gritty WH40K is and how tough law enforcement has to be to keep order. The second book did not deal all that much with the law. The author talked about the law and the research Shira did to prepare for the hearing. But when the hearing came, it turned into a battle and no law was actually done. That bothered me because I did not feel like Shira was very important to that book. One problem I had with the books is the number of character's the author introduces. I seriously considered making a list of them while reading so I could keep them all straight. The primary characters are easy, but there are a lot of secondary characters that can get confusing.

I had never heard of either Matt Farrer or Shira Calpurnia before I picked up this omnibus, so I really had no expectations, but even if I had looked forward to this for months I would not have been disappointed. The author's intriduction sets the stage very well, talking about how ordinary humans in the 40th millenium could be just as bad as the aliens or corrupted. I am a big fan of detective novels, and the protagonist Shira Calpurnia is very well done. One of the worst problems the Black Library (the publisher of these types of books) has is that it sometimes lets books slip out that make no sense and where the author has no grasp of the setting. Farrer has the setting down cold. These novels are filled with the crazy darkness of the Warhammer 40k universe, with the Arbites standing out as cold and efficient dispensers of justice. If you want to find out more about the Adeptus Arbites and what it is like to be normal in a universe filled with the supernatural and fantastic, get this book. If you have liked any of the various novels about the Imperial Guard, you will not be disappointed.