BattleTech: The Damocles Sanction

By: Michael J. Ciaravella

Narrated by: Mauricio Rivero Borrell, Catherine Crimmins

TO REFORGE A NATION…

The once-mighty Federated Suns has been weakened by years of conflict on both sides of its border. Its proud capitol, New Avalon, has been held by its mortal enemies, the Draconis Combine, for years, forcing First Prince Julian Davion to rule his fractious nation on the run.

But at long last, the time to liberate New Avalon from the Dragon is at hand. And despite very different opinions as to how they retake the Davion family’s seat of power, Julian and his Prince’s Champion, Field Marshal Erik Sandoval, must work together to free the planet, the first step to rebuilding their proud nation.

Yet liberating New Avalon is only the first step. While the First Prince attempts to hold the marches together and the Prince’s Champion battles Draconis Combine forces on nearby worlds, new threats lurk around every corner. Facing dangers both at home and abroad, both men must fight to preserve the Davion throne while ensuring their own rivalry doesn’t spark a brand-new conflict—one that could tear the Federated Suns apart all over again…

©2022 Topps, Inc. (P)2026 Topps, Inc.

Good story, lackluster narration

The story was great. Exactly what I want and expect from a BattleTech novel. Lots of stompy robots, political intrigue, and character drama.

I would have preferred to read the book though. The narrators were a bit flat in the delivery and there were a lot of pronunciation errors that really broke immersion. This has been a consistent trend with recent audiobooks and it feels like there’s no proofing or care put into the performance.

Great addition and continues the saga of battletech.

Good narrative. Okay reading. The different recordings chopped together must be intentional but i cant figure out the reason. To the women narrator… youve been in a few battletech novels now… and still manage to horribly mispronounce common words of multiple languages. Please do your research ahead of time. It really throws me out of the narrative when the mispronunciation happens, which Im sure is not your intention.

Great Battletech Book. Poor Audio.

While this is one of the better recent BT novels, this audio presentation is very amateurish. Sentences are redubbed with different audio mixing which is distracting. A few mispronuciations of common words. Characters have absurdly thick accents for some reason which is a bit much. Toronaga has a sniveling tone which doesn't fit with the elder New Samarkand warlord.

Great story

Occasionally the narration would change pitch/sound like they were away from the microphone. The story is great. Absolutely recommend

Good Story, Poorly Performed

The story is classic Battletech, good if not great; the performances make me question future purchases.

This pair of actors has done the last few new releases, and they’re capable performers with a range of accents, but the tone is the problem: the characters mispronounce common terms, the line readings often feel incongruent with the characters, include comical overacting, and lines re-recorded at comically low audio quality.

This isn’t a problem with the actors, it’s the director: the person who should have a sense of the tone of the book and doing quality control seems entirely absent.

This problem needs fixed before the new releases.