Ghosts of Timkovichi Review: It Never Rain Dogs, But It Pours
So, Bryan Young’s fantastic Ghosts of Timkovichi is now out, and that means that I can discuss the book’s finer details without being too worried about spoiling things for folks who weren’t as lucky as me in regards to getting an ARC. If you don’t want spoilers, you should go check out my BlueSky thread discussing my impressions of the book without getting too deep in the meat of it – but then, if you’re here reading this article, you probably came looking for a no-holds-barred discussion. Still, for the sake of being thorough, here is the line past which there will be spoilers! Caveat lector!
Alright, if you’re still reading you don’t care about spoilers, so here’s the quick synopsis of Ghosts:
It’s 3152, and Hank Mallory and his scrappy Ghost Dogs, after beating up some cast-off Jade Falcon sibkiddies and taking them as bondsmen, finally get called back into the fold of the Kell Hounds, because Callandre Kell herself has a mission for them – return to Timkovichi, the site of the Hounds’ mauling ten years before, and help ensure the world remains independent of either Jade Falcon or Lyran control. The Dogs wind up caught in the middle of the conflict, although they have the benefit of getting support from the native Timokovichians in their efforts to keep the planet free, which makes their initial efforts against the Falcon remnants and the Lyrans (and their own hired guns) go rather well.
Sadly, everything goes pear-shaped when Lyran reinforcements, led by a very minor member of House Steiner, show up and start stamping all over the Ghost Dogs’ perfectly cromulent plan. It all culminates in one final massive battle sequence, full of artillery barrages and heartbreak, before a final denouement consisting of a tearjerker funeral sequence and then an epilogue set to one of my favorite Tom Waits songs.
You read that right, there’s a funeral at the end of this book. Apparently, Bryan Young wasn’t satisfied with the emotional trauma he caused all the Fox Patrol fans at the end of Outfoxed and decided he needed to stick us with more knives; after several novellas of grumbling about his potential retirement, Colonel Hank Mallory goes out like a hero.
I’m being glib, because the alternative is being honest about crying at that beat. I’ve enjoyed Hank Mallory as a character since he first showed up in Giving up the Ghost back in 2023; he always felt a bit like Hannibal from The A-Team, but with a bit more of a paternal vibe, not to mention driving a Wolfhound instead of a panel van. Ghosts gives us Hank at his most vulnerable, because the book forces him to confront two of his most traumatizing past defeats: Timkovichi, and his estranged son, who Callandre assigns to the Ghost Dogs.
Ghosts of Timkovichi is a fantastic example of how even a tabletop wargame tie-in novel can have some serious emotional weight just waiting to sucker-punch a reader. Hank’s struggles to connect with his son Keith are as powerful as they are painfully awkward – how do you get through emotional walls that have calcified with ten years of resentment? – and as someone who hasn’t spoken to her own father in twenty years, well, let’s just say understood Keith’s feelings on the matter, even without the benefit of him serving as a viewpoint character for those scenes. In the acknowledgements for the book, Young talks about how he channeled his own darkest anxieties as a father into writing the rift between Hank and Keith, and that anchor in real-world emotions is what lets this fictional relationship resonate so strongly.
Switching to a brighter note – one that I already discussed to some degree in my Bluesky thread – I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss one of Ghosts’ other stellar characters, Tom Frost. A grizzled singer-songwriter-journalist-troubadour with a pork-pie hat and a unique outlook of pragmatic existentialism? Delicious! I knew Young was a Tom Waits fan ages ago – the appearance of a town called Mayor’s Income on Sudeten in Without Question cinched it – but while past books may have had a reference or two to Waits’ oeuvre, Ghosts is a book that uses his music as a foundational part of the story. Frost himself could easily be considered an expy of Waits, but that would be an oversimplification of his role in the story; expies are by nature referential characters whose narrative weight is accomplished by nods and winks to their origin, but while Frost may nod and wink along at his own referential nature as he invites Hank Mallory to join him at the Nighthawk Diner, he earns his place as a force for the narrative by virtue of his unique position in the BattleTech canon. Frost is one of the most powerful characters in the story, and unlike most BattleTech protagonists (or perhaps he’s better labeled a deuteragonist) he’s also the only one who never carries a gun. His weapons are words and music, his targets are hearts and minds, and it’s his skills as a journalist that become one of the deciding elements in the struggle over control of Timkovichi.
That’s where Ghosts’ second emotional punch comes from. While the first acts of the book have the Ghost Dogs and their allies affecting asymmetrical warfare against numerically superior foes and generally winning with aplomb, everything changes when Colonel Theodore Hachtel-Steiner shows up at the head of an entire Lyran regiment. A classic example of a Lyran social general, Hachtel-Steiner is far more concerned with his own rising star in the constellation of Lyran nobility than such petty things as morality or reason, and the war quickly switches from strategic skirmishes to a full-on guerrilla slugfest against a totalitarian bastard. Frost’s journalism winds up an integral part of helping convince the population of Timkovichi to rise up against the Lyran forces, despite Hachtel-Steiner’s willingness to order his soldiers to mow down civilians by the dozens.
As a transgender American in 2026, there’s something about that setup that really hits home for some reason.
Hachtel-Steiner is a phenomenal and very real villain, standing in stark contrast to MechWarrior Coote, the leader of the Jade Falcon remnant. While the fandom has been quick to paint most Falcons as mustache-twirling baby-kicking psychopaths in recent years thanks to the actions of Malvina Hazen, Coote is just a sad man stretched well beyond his breaking point. Never trained to lead, let alone govern a planet, he’s just a soldier left behind and given impossible orders, and he does his duty to follow those all the way to his end. Hachtel-Steiner, on the other hand, is the real monster, eagerly giving orders to level a city as soon as he meets even the slightest resistance. His descent into egomaniacal madness by the end resonates with tones of Nero fiddling while Rome burns; unwilling to see his looming failure, he only ever doubles down on his worst choices and impulses.
All in all, Ghosts of Timkovichi is a fantastic read. It’s Young’s longest BattleTech novel, and absolutely benefits from the page count; the story rises and falls thrillingly, the battles never fall into the ever-looming trap of reading like a tabletop round report, and the individual Ghost Dogs all get their chances to shine. The secondary cast, from Old Tom Frost to the them-fatale Ransom Cameron, all pulse with vibrancy on the page and continue to show that some of the most interesting BattleTech characters are the ones who never set foot in a cockpit. At this point, with both Ghosts and Outfoxed having proved to be tearjerkers in the end, I’m just waiting for Bryan’s next Jade Falcon novel (whenever that winds up releasing) to finish off this combo of emotionally powerful giant robot novels (although to be fair, the next two upcoming parts of his Dominion Civil War novella series will both release first and almost definitely also make me cry).