Fine, I'll keep it fresh.
Just finished 'Reading' Dan Abnett (Again!), this time a non-40k book called Embedded. Slightly Sci-Fi Military fiction, with a twist, which I will now reveal (since its in the blurb and is essentially THE PLOT, rather than a spoiler...), that a hapless reporter type is mentally riding that bad-ass soldier into combat to get the scoop, when said Bad Ass Soldier dies, and the non-soldier on board has to take over the not-quite cooling meat.
Its pretty good, but not great. Abnett tries too hard to sell his near-ish future with things like 'Scotch-effect', and 'chicken-effect'... by which he apparently means 'fake scotch' and 'fake chicken', because real scotch or chicken would be too expensive for normal people to eat... or something. On the other hand, it was very nice to see him come up with a plausible alternative to normal greetings, and not spend pages explaining it. He's usually pretty good at minor cultural details like that.