The secret of the Warhammer 40,000 setting's broad appeal is the vast, dizzying diversity of it. It's crammed full of stuff, far more than you'd have ever thought would have been required for the background to a miniatures wargame and various spin-off games, to the extent that it takes vast, groaning wikis to document it all (and the Lexicanum isn't even slightly comprehensive).

Perhaps that's why the 40K universe keeps attracting talents superior to those who sup at the cesstrough of the various Dungeons & Dragons tie-in franchises - for a tie-in series policed by a corporate editorial policy you get a strange amount of freedom to write about the sort of stuff you're actually interested in. In the space of a 300 page book you can write stories about mysterious Inquisitorial investigations, or cutthroat low-life squabbles, or epic space battles, or good old-fashioned gunplay in exotic alien environments, or brutal political intrigues in the court of a Chaos warlord, or even a tale from the point of view of the more well-rounded alien races like the Eldar (and that's just a small cross-section of the sort of story the universe can support).

What you probably should not try to do is combine all of the above in the same book. Masters of the art like Dan Abnett can occasionally get away with two or three focuses per book, but a novice should really pick one aspect of the universe to explore and stick to it rigidly.

To be fair to Gordon Rennie, author of Shadow Point, he almost manages this. Shadow Point seems to have a vague aim of being a tie-in with Battlefleet Gothic, Games Workshop's game of starship combat in the Warhammer 40,000 setting; it is, in fact, set in the same sector as the game (the Gothic sector, hence the local Battlefleet being called... yeah, you got it). Extensive sections of the book consist entirely of space battles - and when I say extensive I mean that, whilst there are only two space battles, if there were a third the book would run wildly over its alloted page count. Each space battle is spiced up by an exciting hand-to-hand combat occurring elsewhere involving characters we actually care about. (In the first case, there's the murderous efforts of a wonderfully corrupt Chief Petty Officer to eliminate his major competitor and seize control of the below-decks contraband trade under cover of the battle. In the second case, there's a diplomatic clusterfuck that is attacked by mysterious interlopers - though now I think of it, the only character I really cared about in that fight was the exact same Chief Petty Officer.)

Where the book suffers is in the bits between the fighting; you know, the parts that give the battles context. When the shooting stops Rennie can't resist cramming a million different viewpoint characters into the book (he uses multiple viewpoints in the battles too, but to much better effect) with a million different agendas and backgrounds. The upshot of this is that no one viewpoint character in the peacetime segments gets enough spotllight time to do anything especially interesting or provide the reader with any deep insights, which means that the plotline is predictably paper-thin. There's the Empire, right, and there's the Warmaster Abaddon and his Thirteenth Black Crusade of Chaos, and they are fighting, and there's a dodgy Inquisitor who wants to get the Battlefleet to commit a mildly heretical indiscretion and join forces with the Eldar (think space elves in clown costumes) against Chaos, and Warmaster Abaddon is all HA I WILL SEND MY EXPENDABLE UNDERLING TO MAKE ALLIANCE WITH THE DARK ELDAR AND WE WILL AMBUSH THEM BOTH, and then the ambush happens, and the Dark Eldar trick the Eldar and the humans into thinking that each has betrayed the other, but then the good guys realise that it is a trick and they get all shooty at the Dark Eldar and their Chaos allies, and then the expendable Chaos underling gets taken away to the Dark Eldar capital to be spanked on the bottom for eternity, and then the Eldar and the Empire attack the Chaos fleet and it is all like YAAAAY VICTORY, and Abaddon is supposedly looking for the Talismans of Vaul and it is NEVER EVER EVER EXPLAINED WHAT THE FUCK THOSE ARE GODDAMNIT RENNIE LEARN TO WRITE A PLOT THAT MAKES SENSE.

So yeah, the plot isn't very good. It doesn't help that (in theory at least) Shadow Point is a sequel to Rennie's previous Warhammer 40,000 novel, Execution Hour. Not because it includes a lot of plot elements you need to read the previous book to understand - to be honest, I've not read the other book, but I think Shadow Point stands on its own pretty well. No, it suffers for two reasons. Firstly, because it is a sequel, I get the impression that Rennie feels obliged to include some characters that really don't need to be here; I suspect the expendable Chaos underling is one of those, and he's a good example of the problem - his segments of the book are short and utterly expendable, existing only to say "look, here's what this guy is doing", so if you didn't read the previous book all you know is that he's a wannabe backstabber who ends up being blubbery Dark Eldar spankbait. The second issue with the book being a sequel is that Rennie is clearly assuming he will be allowed to write further sequels after this one, an assumption which so far has proven incorrect. (Good call, Black Library). As a result, there are elements to the book which are not only never resolved, but aren't even properly addressed, like the Talismans of Vaul. Also, the epilogue feels rushed and disjointed, as if the Black Library came back to Rennie and said "look, we're cancelling the series, could you redo the epilogue so it's a bit less open-ended?"

Rennie's prose style is also, frankly, sloppy. As far as I can tell most of his work consists of comic book scripts, which is presumably a field where highly detailed and slightly redundant descriptions are to be encouraged because they make the artist's life easier. And, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with the visual descriptions in the actual battles, they're very vivid and, in the case of the space battles, goes a long way towards helping you understand what is going on with all this non-existent tech that people are using to fly around and shoot at each other with.

The problem comes when the shooting stops and the talking starts. I'll give you a little example of the most egregious example of this: the main human space captain is standing about on his somewhat Star Trek like bridge, contemplating the coming battle against an orkish fleet, and while he chats to his second-in-command he mentions that orks are like weeds. (Most people would stop there.) Then his second-in-command expresses confusion. Then the captain explains about how his grandfather, who was a space admiral who fought the orks, had a nice garden on his home planet, and how as a child the captain visited him whilst he was doing some work weeding his garden. Then, because the second-in-command comes from the hive world of Necromunda (think a grimy, cyberpunky Corsucant) with no natural vegetation, the captain explains that weeds are nasty little plants that will choke a garden if you don't deal with them, and how they have a nasty tendency to reemerge when you think you've exterminated them all. Then the captain explains how his grandfather, the space admiral who used to fight the orks, whilst exterminating weeds from his garden would compare the weeds to orks. Then the captain explains that orks are like weeds, because when you think you've exterminated them all they will spread again and come back with a vengeance. Then the second-in-command yells at him to shut the fuck up - NO WAIT THAT WAS ME.

And I almost gave up on the book at that point, but then the shooting started and I was hooked again, because Rennie does write entertaining fights. That said, I do wonder whether I would have enjoyed them as much if I didn't recognise every move, feint, and explosion from games of Battlefleet Gothic and Warhammer 40,000...

Shadow Point, ultimately, is a collosal fumble, consisting of two long battles which I think are exciting, but I still wouldn't recommend them to someone who wasn't into Warhammer, sandwiched between thick layers of baked shit. No wonder they only let Rennie write comics these days; if you want Imperial Navy action with better writing and without a billion sprawling side-plots, I recommend Relentless instead.