Traitor General and His Last Command, by Dan Abnett. First of all, I think that Abnett is bar none one of the best authors in terms of writing in a cinematic style; each of his novels is like a literary version of Saving Private Ryan in an IMAX theatre. These most recent of his novels in a series following the exploits of Gaunt’s Ghosts, a wonderful mishmash of characters that are worth following through several books, are somewhat different than earlier stories in that they have something of a tighter focus. Traitor General concentrates on a small group of the main characters through the course of a desperately quickly paced story that doesn’t exactly end, but pulls a Dune and leaves the plot just as it’s really beginning, in a sense (hopefully I'm not ruining anything by saying that, it should be fairly obvious by a certain point that there's no way the novel could reasonably end within its size).

Interestingly, His Last Command doesn’t pick up at all where Traitor General leaves off, but rather sidesteps the actual telling of a good deal, and instead shows the results of that missing time in distinct changes in the characters involved, and follows their reintegration with the rest of the family/community of characters. Also, as usual, Abnett’s science fiction settings, while placed within the 40k shared setting, are crafted with care and originality, with that of Traitor General having special note because of it’s exploration of the evil side’s perspective, as it were.