Positive sounding review title: Might be good for fans of the Expanse
Honest title: I found this very flat, but you might not, other reviews of it are great

I found this book boring, the main character annoying, the story predictable. Overall the book just pissed me off.

It opens with main character who’s name I didn’t catch till way late on, on some sort of mining station ship thing, single handedly quashing some sort of rebellion cause he’s a hard as nails veteran that’s seen it all and knows it all. He does sound great and RC Bray gets that noir old detective voice perfect.

First thing that ticked me off: We’re in the middle of a fight scene, MC enters a room and there’s a big ass mining equipment attacking him. Does MC:
Fight the thing
Avoid the thing
Go on a long and unnecessary internal monologue explaining how the thing is used for mining although that never really ends up being relevant

The second thing that ticked me off was the scene from the Expanse where the gritty old guy goes to the bar and there’s a tall pale guy and they’re giving each other some shade. And the tall guy’s a ringer cause low gravity and no sunlight. At this point I realized I was probably being unfair to the book that I should try to find some good points.

Good points:

Earth was hit by a meteor in 2034 and the action takes place 300 years later showing the lingering effects of this. There’s a population on Titan that’s from an Ark that left Earth as the meteor was swooshing in, and they’ve lived in isolation until the recent past. Now the Earthers have found them and are giving them all the germs and killing them off due to all the diseases they don’t have immunity too. There’s also a pretty neat cyborg teenager who’s probably on the autism spectrum, though turning kids into killing machines cause they lack social skills seems weird to me, I dunno. He makes for a cool character though.

That’s all I got, back to the bad:

About half way through I went online to see reviews of this. And many said the ending and the plot twist was great. I thought to myself, betcha the plot twist is this thing that the author brings up every other chapter while going nudge nudge wink wink. Now, I never see the solutions to mystery books, but this one was obvious a mile away even to me. This book just feels like a trope salad.

The book finishes on a cliffhanger, based on a detail that’s again supposed to be some big plot twist, which I felt was only written in so there could be a reason for a sequel.

I was hoping the ending would redeem the book but for me it just made it worse. The MC has an epiphany that money-hungry corporations who don’t value human life are money-hungry corporations that don’t value human life. You don’t say. And it only took him an entire book and his entire career to get that point.

Clearly based on goodreads and audible reviews other people liked it. So I guess I’d grudgingly recommend this to fans of the Expanse who want something not too different. Also people who like a brooding protagonist, a lot of pew-pew and don’t mind an occasional bit of questionable science.