Blood Avatar is a radical departure from the rest of the BattleTech books. Ilsa Bick even warns the reader of this in her acknowledgments. Not that it's not a part of the universe—it definitely is, and layers in hints of events to come that promise to be… interesting.

Much like Ilsa's prior works, this book pulls no punches. The main plot concerns a violent, mentally disturbed murderer, and both his thoughts and the aftermath of his work are told as they would be. I almost want to term the style hyperrealistic.

I guess the one thing keeping me from giving the book a perfect score is that while it's an excellent book, I'm not sure just how good of a MechWarrior/BattleTech book it is. Maybe after I see how the hints tie in to the rest of the story I'll change my mind, but for now that's how it'll be.

That said, I still highly recommend this book to anyone, BattleTech fan or not, science fiction fan or not. It doesn't really fall into either of those; it's really a psychological murder mystery trying to hide under those names. I just hope that readers are able to look past the logo on the cover & see the real book within. ( )