When I was in high school and college I played a lot of a game called BattleTech, a tabletop strategy game about ‘Mechs on a battlefield. Many computer games have been developed since then using the same property (MechWarrior) so I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with it. But I absolutely loved this genre, so will pick up anything I find on the subject.

I have also listened to the Fighting Iron series by Jake Bible and loved them immensely – in major part because the talented narrator J. Scott Bennett was the storyteller. So I had no problem picking up another book by Jake Bible because of that experience and my love for ‘mechs.

In summary, I was lukewarm about this title – not because of the content but because of the narrator.

The story of Mech Corps itself was good. It reminded me of the first alien movie, only if the Nostromo had ‘mechs on board to battle the Alien(s). What a different ending that would have been! In this book I liked the team of ‘mech pilots as a whole, and how each member of the team had a specialty. However, and I’m realizing this as I’m typing, none of the team’s specialties were ever really shown in action. For example, Giga was the sniper, but she was never used *as* as sniper in the book. Same with Gore, who was the demolition expert. He was never used to blow anything up. I think each member of the team would have been better fleshed out to the reader if they could identify them in action. Just some rambling here, but those are my thoughts. This doesn’t seem to be a series, but who knows – maybe in future books this could be expounded on.

Looking at other Jake Bible titles on Audible, I see a lot were narrated by Andrew Wehrlen, who also narrated this title. Andrew has a deep wonderful voice, and based on the number of Jake Bible titles he’s narrated, the author seems think this as well. For the most part Andrew did a great job on this title. His female voices were good and believable, and his production was on par. But I have did have a couple of issues with his performance:

* Quite a few times Andrew spoke so fast his speach was slurred and I literally could not understand what was said, even when I rewound. That is a major issue and should be worked on.

* The silence gaps between scenes were so short I sometimes didn’t realize the scene actually changed.

All of this could have fixed by cranking the playback speed back to 0.75x, but as a listener I shouldn’t have to do that. Mr. Wehrlen has the ability to be a first class narrator if he would address these issues.

Inside joke of the book: Son of a butch!

This audio book was gifted to me by the narrator in exchange for an unbiased review.