Leviathan Wakes

I was surprised by the ending of the book not least because I thought I was only halfway through. It turns out the ebook was two volumes in one, with Daniel Abraham’s fantasy book The Dragon’s Path attached. I must have known about it back when I bought the ebook, but had completely forgotten about it. One for another time.
This was a very satisfying space opera, not the kind of galactic scale but of the more believable Solar System sort with travel between destinations largely dictated by the limitations of the human organism when it comes to high acceleration. People have moved out from Earth to Mars, to the asteroid belt, and to the outer planets, changing in both physiological and cultural ways over time. Playing against the spacefaring part of the book is a good dose of hardboiled detective story. I wouldn't be surprised if two authors who write under the name James S. A. Corey divided up the tale in the two genres between themselves in the first draft, meshing them together during rewrites and revisions afterwards, giving them a kind of advantage over a solitary author, at least in some respects. The end product is a story with convincingly individual characters with motivations I could believe, set against a series of backdrops each with subtle distinguishing features.
The best part about the story is the way they keep ramping up the challenges to the core band of characters, maintaining suspense as they find themselves in deeper and deeper predicaments along the way. They also seemed to have a fairly deft touch in the way they could incorporate the character moments in a more or less natural fashion. I’d be happy to read the other books in the series to see how things shape up.