>>96410864
Fehervari's Dark Coil stories have bumped up tau significantly in my eyes. There's a lot of fun stuff to do with them. The fact that they're generally sane and not as kill-on-sight as chaos, orks, and tyranids tend to be allows for a lot of fun tau/imperium interactions. They're also a lot more down-to-earth than eldar when it comes to interspecies interactions. My favorites (in order):

>Fire Caste (novel)
Tau/guard with sprinkles of mechanicus and chaos. Primarily a guard book but with a couple different Tau POVs. There's lots of interactions between humans and tau, both with the actual imperial guardsmen themselves and with the side-switching human (and abhuman) janissaries. Chaos makes a big appearance near the end (like it always seems to) and Tau are, as ever, unprepared. There's a particular string of interactions between a tau interrogator and his guardsman prisoner which touches on how tau see chaos, which plays into why they have so much trouble dealing with it. Tons of fun.

>Sanctuary of Wyrms (short story)
Tau exploratory team investigates ancient abandoned human structure. Tyranids and deathwatch feature. Showcases that humans and tau, despite fearing and misunderstanding each-other, at least recognize that tyranids are total fuckers.

>The Greater Evil (short story)
Tau follow up on a lead in a human mining facility that one of their agents has lead them to believe has been prepped to induction into The Greater Good. Surprise, it's gene stealers! Everything goes to hell immediately as the tau and remaining humans try to survive and get off the rig.

I was never a big fan of them before those books, and I actually only started the Dark Coil stuff because of a Night Lord short story somebody linked on /tg/ but his tau material is probably my favorite.