I like reading a good space opera every once in a while, and really enjoyed this one. Or rather, it’s a space opera in content and themes, but structured more as a noir + horror novel. Good mix of gumshoe and sci-fi.
This is sort of a tweener in science fiction — not an immediate future type of book, and not a far future book like the Ian Banks books. It’s set in our solar system after we’ve colonized Mars and the asteroid belt — so the big political entities are the Earth and Mars, with the asteroid belt as a sort of frontier land.
Fun book, good pacing, entertaining. First of a trilogy.
His Long Price Quartet (under his real name) is an excellent fantasy series in a rather gray world.
Finished this one in a couple of nights. It was my kind of popcorn junk food scifi book.
I seem to remember reading an interview with the authors of this one, who mentioned it started life as the sourcebook to a role-playing game. With that in mind, it kind of read that way to me, like a novelization of a few weeks’ worth of gaming nights around the table.
Ah, here it was:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/05/interview-daniel-abraham-and-ty-franck-aka-james-a-corey-author-of-leviathan-wakes/
An MMORPG first, but later a table-top RPG