Review.

Centers of Gravity

Markos Kloos

Book 8 of Frontlines
Pub date: 30 August 2022
Publisher: North47
Reviewed from NetGalley

I first encountered Markos Kloos back in 2013 when I wanted to give a few self-published writers a try and picked up Terms of Enlistment — which was the first book in the Frontlines series and published through Smashwords (note: it has since been republished under the North47 imprint). As an first dive into self-published sci-fi, it was a rousing success and I really enjoyed the book. Fast-forward almost 10 years and Kloos is releasing his eighth book in the series this year, and, like the preceding seven, it was a lovely romp well worth the (refreshingly low) price.

Centers of Gravity is not going to win any awards…well it might, but it’s certainly not cutting-edge, literary-style sci-fi… but it is solid story-telling with great characterization and a worthy continuation of the Andrew Grayson story. If you are looking for good story, with a healthy dose of military action, some side-commentary on what the future could hold and a well measured dollop of what lies behind the military mindset, then this book (and this series) is a great investment.

I probably wouldn’t recommend picking this one up without reading a least a few of the earlier books. Centers of Gravity continues following the military career of Andrew Grayson who started out in the ghettos and is now a Major in the Commonwealth Defense Corps. As a direct sequel to Book 7: Orders of Battle — which had Grayson stranded in a distant system on a recon mission — this time he has to not only figure out how to survive, but how to make it home again if they do. I am pretty sure Centers of Gravity marks the conclusion of the Frontlines series—although Kloos does leave it open enough that he can spin off a different storyline—and if so I declare it a great bookend to what was a great series.

A note about the whole series: my experience with self-pub’d books has been mixed but Kloos produced a well-written and well-paced novel right from the start, both excellently edited and free of a lot of the common conceits you find in some self-published works…although to be fair, I have no idea how much North47 acts, or doesn’t act, as a traditional publisher. My only beef is that North47 publications (who are a publishing arm of Amazon) only make their titles available on Amazon and as azw files. So if you want to read it on a different platform, you are going to have to figure out a way to convert it (hint: use Calibre ).