In retrospect, Ghost War is not a typical BattleTech novel, but I can't say I mind overmuch.

I have to admit, Stackpole's novel holds a special place for me; it's the first BattleTech book I read, and is more or less responsible for my subsequent purchase of the 92 other (English language) novels in the series, plus an assortment of sourcebooks.

Given that I naturally have it up on a rather high pedestal, I was half-afraid that when I reread it recently it wouldn't hold up. Fortunately, for the most part, it did.

The novel served well as an introduction for me, because it was written to serve as an introduction for new readers; with its jump into the setting of MechWarrior: Dark Age, Ghost War had to not only introduce the changes in the 65-year gap, but also make itself accessible to players of MWDA who weren't familiar with the BattleTech setting.

But now that I've read the rest of the books and gone back to it, how does it stack up?

Pretty well, I think.

Ghost War is a spy novel at heart. Stackpole maintains control of the pacing and plot, letting the reader get a sense of the big picture only when Sam Donnelly does. Even across the multiple planets and settings, Stackpole still manages to spend time developing his fairly sizable cast. In a way, this book is more revealing about everyday life in the Inner Sphere than most books before it; Stackpole spends quite a bit of time out of the cockpit, on the ground among the "common" people. When many of the books before and after this focus on the nobility and their 'Mechs, it's a welcome change of pace.

The book isn't perfect; the narrator occasionally veered into Corran Horn's speech patterns ("Enable help files, please"), but overall I thought the two characters were fairly distinct. And despite the occasional slip in dialogue and the new look at the universe, Stackpole never lost the sense of the BattleTech setting.

If you're a BattleTech or MechWarrior fan and are looking to get started with the novels, or indeed are a fan of Stackpole's books in general (which is what brought me to the book in the first place), you could do far worse than Ghost War. ( )

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