This is another fine work by Marko KLoos. It builds slowly giving us a picture of Earth after 4 years of not being attacked. The Grayson's have time grieve and decompress from years of war.Halley has a training job thats not too stressful. Andrew is flying a desk at a training base in the arctic.

Second half of the book is a pure adrenaline rush.Andrew gets a mission that is dangerous but doable. This mission suddenly devolves into a knife fight with 3 Lanky seed-ships.

My perennial gripe with this series is that the Lanky's are not given a voice. These huge monsters have developed space travel and FTL ability and yet we are not voice or hint to their motives.

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Pretty good story--this...7th book in the series. . Author's knowledge of the CCT career field is amazing--he must have done it...grunts act just like their real counterparts. Ending is kinda funky as it just ends--there must be a sequel. Title, Orders of Battle, has absolutely nothing to do with the book theme, plot or characters. It must have been chosen by some publisher on the 22nd floor of a building in Manhattan whose only fight was subway traffic. If there is a sequel, I'll wait. ( )

Marko Kloos writes about a scene in this book as if he lived the experience. Major Andrew Grayson, his main character in Orders of Battle, takes into account the size and layout of the room, its furnishings, wall hangings, and people, as well as the attitudes of those people toward him. Although this attention to scene detail is interesting and shoes a mastery of writing skills, it makes Orders of Battle a longer story episode than it needs to be. This book is the seventh entry in the Frontline series and the pace and the way the book ended tells me that there will be several more books needed to finish this series.

While I enjoy getting into a well-written book series due to its familiar characters, at some point, either from waiting so long for the succeeding book or due to displeasure about the series not concluding, I abandon it. Frontline has now crossed into that line for me.

How many books in a series is too many? I think anything more than five is too many, with three being about right. When too many books are needed to complete a series, it ceases being an escapist story and becomes more about a character's daily life.

I like Kloos’ writing but the Frontline storyline suffers from too much coverage of the mundane. He is already beginning to show this same averageness focus in the second book of the Palladian Wars series. I hope he wraps that story up in the next book otherwise I may find myself moving away from Kloos books entirely. ( )