** spoiler alert ** Third of three in the Axis of Time series. It's a good fast read. I suspect it was researched thoroughly but written hastily.

Some characters are well developed, others are cardboard caricatures. Admiral King continues so be so ludicrous that I want to throw the book across the room every time he appears. Kolhammer and Jones are impossibly competent in a Heinleinesque way; perhaps it's a tribute.

Author was careful to explain how ship A could communicate with ship B 200 miles away, but didn't tell us how they pulled off a worldwide videoconference without having satellites, especially when he explicitly mentions their lack a few pages later.

At the end, they are talking about dividing Japan. We're told that the Good Guys will get Tokyo, as if that matters when the city was completely destroyed about ten pages earlier.

There's some sloppy editing. A character struggles to breath (not breathe); the Japanese missiles are sometimes Ohkas, sometimes Okhas; and there wee several other sloppy bits that a copy editor should have caught.

It's military porn. I understand that there's an audience for that. Things happen that need to happen, and in reasonably plausible ways, but as guts hang out, people are turned to a "pink mist", and gory deaths abound, I get the feeling that the author was enjoying himself a little too much; if he were reading the book to us he'd say, "Hoo-hah, here comes a juicy bit!"

If the world of sci-fi is a month's worth of different meals, this is a container of fairly good fries from a roadside takeout. You eat them all, and they're tasty, but later you wonder if you couldn't have used the day's calories better.