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Blood Pact is the Gaunt's Ghosts novel where Dan Abnett took his long-running Imperial Guard infantry series off the front line and put it into a city interrogation thriller. The Tanith First-and-Only are deployed to a fortified Imperial city. A high-value prisoner is being interrogated. The Blood Pact, the chaos faction the series has been fighting for years, is coming for the prisoner, and Gaunt and the Ghosts have to keep him alive long enough to extract intelligence.
The book is leaner than most of the earlier entries. There are no big set-piece battles. The tension is procedural and the stakes are moral. Abnett uses the slower pace to deepen characters who have been with the series for a decade. Gaunt himself is at his most weary and most interesting.
Four stars. Not for new readers of the series. For long-time fans, this is one of the best in the run.
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