Rachel Harrison’s novella Blood Rite, the second in Black Library’s Space Marine Heroes series (after Phil Kelly’s entertaining Death Knell), is a mournful, characterful exploration of the Blood Angels’ twin flaws and what it takes to resist them. Luminata, an Imperial world protecting a chalice said to have been crafted by Sanguinius himself, has fallen to the corruption of the Word Bearers and their warp magic. Captain Donato leads his Archangels in a lightning assault to destroy the heretics and retrieve the chalice, but to succeed they’ll have to battle their own flawed nature as well as the Word Bearers and their tainted allies.
