Sword and Fire: Twilight of the Clans V (The Battle Tech Series , No 39)

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better.
Review: This could have been a very good book but the author did a poor job of bringing the whole thing together. I want the next Stackpole book to come out.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better.
Review: This could have been a very good book but the author did a poor job of bringing the whole thing together. I want the next Stackpole book to come out.

Rating:
Summary: A worthy addition to Twilight
Review: Thomas S. Gressman is a good and capable writer and shares Stackpole's gift for infusing the plot and his characters with life. The fall of the Smoke Jaguar Clan was handled a little flippantly but that is a very small drop in the ocean after all. I found nothing wrong with it. I do feel sad that the good people at FASA see fit to be so unbelievably biased as to wipe out a whole faction such as the Clans which admittedly are far more interesting than their Inner Sphere counterparts.

Rating:
Summary: Uneven Stuff
Review: Well, Gressman is certainly improving which is a blessing. He still makes mistakes in here but they appear to be the result of tight deadlines leaving little time for proofreading, rather than his earlier factual mistakes and improbable events. Still, after reading this novel I feel it would have done wonders to compress his three novels into two. That way the obvious filler spaces would disappear and more thought put into whether an event was probable and/or really needed or just included to impress the readers in some way. The battles were generally much closer run things than before and even going in the Jaguars favour at times. Still, the number of troops that came back from the IS is surprisingly low (doesn't mesh with other sources) and with artillery blasting so many omnimechs and elementals to pieces, before the mech to mech battles have begun, I'm really wondering how the Jags suddenly are doing so well with such small numbers. Looks like over compensation for earlier easy IS victories. Yet all the battles do make SoW much more enjoyable than The Hunters with its long drawn out buildup. One more thing I did get annoyed at is how IS troops are written as almost all heart (Only the Nekekami proved to be coldblooded killers) while the Jaguars are almost always painted as complete bastards. The only tenderness exhibited by a Jaguar happened when an Elemental carried IlKhan Osis to an ambulance. A less black and white view of the people involved would have been nice. I hope that Gressman can turn into a good solid all around author since he does have the potential. At the moments his books are marred by some serious flaws which occasional bursts of brilliance can barely make up for. But these are only his first three books after all. Even Stackpole made some serious mistakes in his first trilogy.

Rating:
Summary: First Battletech book I read...
Review: Yup, this was the first Battletech book that I read. I was looking at the back and saw that Winston is the Eridani Light Horse General so I bought it. I'm one of the ELH in a couple of Mechwarrior leagues. This book was awesome but I thought it was a little slow in the beginning. But I guess it was necessary for the investigation of the Marshal's murder. Still, it left some loose ends... who really hired the assasin? The battles were really awesome. We'll just have to wait until the clans get their reinforcements -- the Inner Sphere warriors mainly fought solahmas and cadets.. we'll see how they'll stand against more capable warriors. The Jaguars paid for what they did to Turtle Bay!!! GO ELH!!!