Books: Chains of Command

I've been following Marko Kloos's "Frontlines" series since its inception, and it's really turning into an excellent military sci-fi saga. In the latest installment, "Chains of Command," the reader finds that protagonist Andrew Grayson has become one of the most experienced combat troopers around, mainly because of an alien invasion of Mars that shattered Earth's military. As such, he's being recruited for a seemingly impossible mission, but one that could swing the balance in the coming war with the aliens.

The first half of "Chains of Command" is a bit slow, a purposeful deep breath after the carnage at the end of the last book, "Angles of Attack." And the series is definitely starting to suffer from the core problem endemic to a long-running first-person military fiction series - namely, that the narrator never gets killed, no matter how dangerous the situations he finds himself in. Still, if you're in this deep, you know you're going to read this, and Kloos does not disappoint.