On one of the interviews with the authors, they talked about how they wanted to make each book in the series a slightly different genre. Caliban's War is certainly sci-fi but this one is definitely lacking the noir aspects of the previous one. It has a much more action movie feel than Leviathan Wakes, which I guess is what happens when you replace the detective character with a marine, a politician, and a scientist.
Unlike the last book, which flipped back and forth evenly between Miller and Holden, this book has no set order to the characters and so sometimes the readers can go a while with out seeing one. Holden is still certainly the star of the show but I enjoyed the politician's chapters a great deal. She is a well done female character. A lot of times (especially in stories written by men) the female characters can be simply "men with boobs" but this character is convincingly female while also being nowhere close to being the other stereotype: the damsel in distress.
While the overall tone was enjoyable, I felt that the plot of this one was a little too derivative of that of the first book. However, unlike the first book, this one gave us a view of the political underpinnings of the event, which made it still a good read. Holden's conflict with his "inner Miller" was tedious and, combined with his self-righteous attitude make it a lot harder to like him this time around. It seems that the authors are going to make him the main character of the whole series and I am glad that most of his personal issues are out of the way by the end of this book.
The series is obviously building towards something, however this book just feels a lot like the scaffolding. Hopefully the next installment pushes the overarching plot along a little more. However, for the people who gobbled up the first book, unless Miller was your favorite character, they will probably gobble up this one too.
Overall, I would give this book a 90%.
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