Hehehe ... I don't care how bad the book is, the review is very amusing.

I've always wondered what it is that a Chief Petty Officer actually does ... I mean with a title like that you have *no choice* but to be corrupt. Where is the Chief Malice Officer and the Chief Smug Officer?

I don't know about real life, but in Shadow Point it is explained to us - in a brief, to-the-point manner, no less! - that the Chief Petty Officer's job is to essentially be a middle man between the non-commissioned officers (he's the highest ranking NCO) and the command staff, and he does stuff like run around the ship making sure everyone is at their correct station during battle.

The CPO in Shadow Point is great; his parts of the book are easily my favourite, especially when he is killing rivals in remarkably callous ways. Frankly, I want to read a 40,000 novel about a crook in the Navy or the Imperial Guard who just wants to grease some palms and get by in the world and can't be having with all this eternal war nonsense. It's why I like the evil second-in-command in Relentless so much.

From having read an awful lot of Tom Clancy and the like in the past, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that real life is the same -- a chief petty officer is the highest-ranking NCO and liaises between the command officers and the enlisted soldiers. Incidentally, if you've ever played Halo, that's who Master Chief is. Wiki has some non-US equivalents.

I know it's weird, but I always wanted to read some 40K that wasn't about wars (or conspiracies to destroy the known universe, which is usually the other option). Given the setting has a lot of interesting background stuff, I'd love to read, for example, a pure detective novel*, or a story of daily life in the Adeptus Mechanicus, or the autobiography of a Rogue Trader. Of course, that might not sit well with the "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war" bit, but we already noticed that's not actually true.

*The Arbites ones are good but always turn into conspiracies.

Hmmm, might be worth checking out the various Necromunda tie-in books, they're meant to be about fighting but it's scummy gangland fighting instead of epic planet-wide fighting.

Shimmin, that's exactly the sort of 40k book that interest me most. (I'll have a look at those Arbites books.)

Xenology - currently out of print, but well worth finding in my slightly obsessed opinion... seriously this is my favourite 40k book.
Eisenhorn trilogy - also apparently the Ravenor trilogy, but I haven't read those. Written by Dan Abnett, who everybody loves.
Imperial Armour IV: The Anphelion Project* - but you could watch Aliens and get largely the same effect... on the other hand, malanthropes! Awesome! (It costs a load of money! NOT so awesome...)
Dark Heresy - which is an RPG sourcebook but it also has a lot of good stuff about the Imperium outside of the battlefield.
Rogue Trader - not 1e 40k, but the upcoming RPG book from Fantasy Flight Games. Should be a bit like Dark Heresy.

*to which I award the Brevity Of Names Award For Extremely Short Names.

Does any of that help? There isn't a lot of non-war stuff out there. I think the Black Library has a policy that authors must write war stories featuring the Imperial Guard when they join - that would explain a lot.

Still, I still have Xenology. I'm happy.