Deep in the bowels of some backwater planet or another, a nefarious alien menace has emerged. There is only one group capable of handling such a dastardly threat. The space marines! *cue cheesy action music*

Okay, I'm poking fun, and it's hard not to. The Warhammer books aren't known for their literary merit. Despite being composed of who-knows-how-many hundreds of books, they are more known for mindless action, and enough backstory to give any enthusiastic fan a rampant lore-boner. Deathwatch doesn't do much to alter that formula, which said fans may be...pleased to hear.

The Deathwatch are an elite group of space marines, hand-picked from across the universe, whose sole purpose is to quell xenos (alien) invasions. In this case there is an alien threat and, um, the Deathwatch battle them. Yep, that's about it. The plot develops slowly, the characters don't develop much at all, and it ends pretty much how you expect. ...and, that's it.

It really wasn't that bad of a read. The first 100 pages or so were horrendous, it was all over the place and I was a drowning man desperately grasping for something to cling to. Once the plot finally formed it did become an enjoyable book though. These types of books always have interesting characters, mostly because they are ridiculously flat, over-the-top, and unbelievable; but I could live with it. After another 200 pages, at about the 300-page mark, the book started bogging down on me again. The characters spent 200 pages in a training camp, learning about group cohesion and battle-readiness, but once the action started the characters were just whiny and obnoxious. Like I said earlier, the characters didn't develop much, and they were pretty much exactly as they were at the start of the story.

Anyway, in the end it was pretty okay. It's far from the greatest thing I've ever read, but I'm interested enough in the characters to seek out more of their books. Assuming I can figure out how to navigate the tangled, convoluted labyrinth that is the Black Library. ( )