Angles of Attack: The Third Installment of the Frontlines Series

K. M. Dorsey: Grayson heads to Earth on the Indy to see if Earth has survived. Crazy stuff is happening in the home system requiring a daring escape. They manage to return the remainder of their fleet just in time to deal with more Lankies. Also, there is a marriage.

United States on Aug 12, 2023

P. Seagrave: This book, like the two before and the Palladium Wars are really a must read for enthusiasts of military SF. Reading the Palladium Wars first has somewhat spoiled me but this 3rd book in the Frontlines series really raises the stakes and tension. Overall a great book and a serious page turner. I can't quite stretch to a 5 star review because I still can't escape the feeling when I read this series that the ideas are somewhat stitched together. Like the Author had lots of ideas and concepts he wanted to use and tried to use them all at once! Also still don't think the alien race is working for me from a threat or even interest perspective. It's not going to stop me buying and reading the next one though!

United Kingdom on Jul 21, 2023

Amazon カスタマー: 最初は少しテンポが気になりますが、そうくるか！という展開があって、読む手が止まらなくなります。

Japan on Jul 09, 2023

C.Paulin: Angles of Attack, the third installment of Kloos’s Fronline series, read like a gap book. Its pacing was terribly slow and was filled with too much superfluous dialogue and too many scenes that went nowhere. It lacked compelling structure and, therefore, felt a little episodic.

*Warning: possible spoilers below*

Likes:
- The tensions and distrust between competing human factions (SRA vs NAC, militias vs regular military, elites vs. common people), demonstrating the hard-wiring of our conflict-filled natures. Humans remain their own worst enemies, even in the face of an existential threat like the Lankies. While the Frontline series has been largely theme-free for the first three books, I hope the author will expand on this in future installments.
- Loved the scenes aboard the Indianapolis that paralleled submarine warfare (minus the issues discussed below).
- The scene detailing the fate of the Indianapolis
- Enjoyed the tension of wondering if Andrew and Halley would ever be reunited

Dislikes:
- Through three books, Greyson has little to no arc. He rarely makes bad decisions that imperil himself or those around him. When he gets into sticky...

Canada on Apr 17, 2023

JW: Fast paced, action packed installment. A great addition to the series as a whole, read them all non stop within a few weeks. Would recommend.

United Kingdom on Mar 26, 2023

Jon Svenson: Now we're in book three. The Mars colony has been lost, and seed pods are making themselves at home in our solar system.

Andrew is still on the icy moon of Fomalhaut, but he's making trips back and forth on a stealth ship so they can resupply the group. That means breaking the Alcubierre blockade by the seed ships, and it involves a few close calls.

I'm still enjoying the series, but book three felt like the author didn't want to move the plot forward too quickly so he came up with a bunch of other ideas, most of which don't involve Andrew. The last half of the book is far better than the first half. I slogged my way through the first fifty percent, which mostly involved Andrew drinking with his favorite sergeant.

It a series worth reading, but it seemed obvious to me that the author wrote this with a mind towards profit. Which means every little idea gets stretched to the breaking point, and the action sequence are spread out with big gaps in between them.

Sigh. 4/5* and I'm hoping for better in book 4.

United States on Aug 29, 2022

N. Walton: I read quite a lot of sci-fi, and I think it's been a long time since I've read anything quite as good as this. This is book three in a series which charts the story arc of humanity as it goes from squabbling space-faring juveniles to having to face down a serious external threat. Each of the first two books felt like complete stories, but by the end of book 2, the first shoe had dropped, and it was definitely time that the other hit the floor...

The book is set in a fledgling human empire that's overstretched and overtaxing its citizens in order to create sufficient colony space to move out all the massively overcrowded PRC citizens on Earth. Out in a desolate unwanted system, two moons are run by competing human factions. One of them: New Svalbard is basically a ball of ice, useful for water which is reaction fuel and for life in space. Perched on this ice ball, far too many soldiers have been marooned without hope of rescue. Supplies are running out, people are getting angry, but a great victory has been won. Unfortunately for the victors, their celebrations are short-lived, as an old threat emerges from the jump point....

Unfortunately for humanity, another...

United Kingdom on Apr 11, 2017

Gregory Price: While I am an avid SciFi reader, military SciFi is often a guilty pleasure; characters and compelling stories are often sacrificed for action and large-scale battles. I was skeptical when I picked up  Terms of Enlistment (Frontlines Book 1) , but I tore through it and its sequels with fervor. Here's what I liked:
- The narrator, Grayson, is an interesting choice. He's not the smartest guy in the room, or always the best solider or tactician; he's a grunt, and like most grunts he only has his orders, his ability to think tactically, and his fellow grunts to rely on. When he does get a glimpse at the bigger picture outside of his infantry bubble, it's clear he's a fly on the wall and not a player. It's often frustrating when he doesn't rush headlong into a dangerous situation, because you want the good guys to win or figure out some secret plot, but you're rewarded as a reader by knowing how vulnerable he is to injury or death, and furthermore that competent commanders would act in accordance with the better part of valor. The flyby of Mars was a harsh reminder of the difficult decisions that need to be made in wartime.
- Just because the combined NAC/SRA task force...

United States on May 16, 2016

The book guy: At the onset of Angles of Attack the third book in Marko Kloos's Frontline series, things are not looking good for humanity. For five years, humanity has been fighting a losing battle of extermination against a seemingly invincible enemy who now stands on the doorstep of Earth about to finish us off. Our oldest and most populous colony on Mars just fell to the Lankies , all major cities and installations have been cleansed off the planet by nerve gas and the enemy has begun terraforming the planet to meet their own biological needs. After this defeat, a refugee fleet of the two main powers on Earth, the North American Coalition (NAC) and Sino-Russian Alliance (SRA) arrive in the New Svalbard system where our main character Staff Sergeant Andrew Grayson and a small contingent of NAC soldiers are currently holed up after a successful mutiny which saw Grayson and group of exiled Homeworld Defense soldiers disobey direct orders to seize the resources of New Svalbard from the colonists for use by the NAC. An alliance of convenience is formed between the NAC and SRA refugee fleets, and although the two sides do not readily trust one another they are willing to integrate their forces...

United States on Apr 28, 2015