I love the epic ending of this book. It makes me want to go out and read the next 10 books in the series right now. (Not that I have that much time on my hands sadly!) Having watched the first four seasons of The Expanse before reading this, I knew some of what to expect. The two are pretty similar in tone, characters, plotline, etc. One thing different was Miller is fleshed out more in the book and his story is has some more nuances and he has more crossover time with the crew of the Rocinante.

Speaking of which, the thing I think the Expanse does best is show different characters in relationship with each other. That is just stellar. The characters are deep, you get a sense of full backstories, but the book isn't so slow-paced as to delve into those in detail or anything. For me the pacing is perfect. (I'm sure there are many for whom this would be too slow though.)

As far as the prose, there are some really good metaphors, but aside from that it's kind of standard stuff.

The worldbuilding is wonderful, perhaps the other thing that The Expanse does best. This is "hard scifi," in the sense that they don't constantly violate the laws of physics. Ships actually fly the way ships would fly in space, inertia is conserved, the insane G-forces involved in manuevering in space wreck havoc on the human body and have to be compensated for in various ways, etc. This, I love. It's very interesting to me to think about how the world (I mean, solar system) might look in a couple hundred years. There are two specific things that are in the books that science doesn't know of a way to make possible currently, but that is kind of called out and safely quarantined. So you have just enough mysterious stuff to provoke a sense of wonder, but not a blatant disregard of the laws of physics. It feels much more realistic and immersive that way.

Why I rate this a 4 and not 5 I couldn't exactly say. I've spent some time pondering that, and at the end of the day I don't think it's anything that's objectively wrong with it; it just isn't in the style that I would prefer, the style that really makes me love something. But I do really enjoy this book and really look forward to reading more.