Fields of Fire: Not as wow as I was hoping it would be

Fields of Fire (Frontlines #5) by Markos Kloos
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ out of 5 stars

The time has come to take the fight to the Lankies.

Mars has been under Lanky control for more than a year. Since then, the depleted forces of Earth’s alliances have rebuilt their fleets, staffing old warships with freshly trained troops. Torn between the need to beat the Lankies to the punch and taking enough time to put together an effective fighting force, command has decided to strike now.

Once again, seasoned veterans Andrew and Halley find themselves in charge of green troops and at the sharp tip of the spear as the combined military might of Earth goes up against the Lankies. But if there’s one constant in war, it’s that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy…and the Lankies want to hold on to Mars as badly as humanity wants to reclaim it.

Time to kick some lanky ass. Or at least that was what I thought. No spoilers but it didn’t go exactly as I hoped. A little bit disappointing actually. Still a good book though.

It felt a bit like a slow start, that has to be said. Quite a bit of dialogue and of course a lot of preparations for the pending festivities.

Once the good parts starts things gets going though. It starts off with some quite good space action followed by the invasion of Mars. From then on it is time for the ground pounders to take over the action.

The author, as he has proven in previous books in the series, are quite good at writing combat action, both in space and on the ground. Add to this that his characters and the story is usually quite good as well and we have a pretty good book. Sure, I have the same gripe as before, which is how a space-faring race can go about behaving like dumb animals as soon as they hit the ground. Okay, they seem to have evolved a bit in this book but still…

Unfortunately the story took a somewhat unexpected turn which, to me at least, was a bit of a disappointment. I obviously cannot give any details without spoiling the story but the feeling I had at the end was like we where back at square one, that after all that fighting we had gotten absolutely nowhere.

Still, it was a good book though with plenty of action.