Abaddon's Gate

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Abaddon's Gate, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War, the previous books in the series.

As I mentioned in the Caliban's War review the authors said that they wanted to do a different thing with each book.  This book is certainly different than the previous two.  The first two hopped about the solar system.  The majority of this book takes place on one ship that barely moves for most of the story.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, once again, it is just different.

Based on the timing of the blog post in which they discuss it, it looks like the authors recieved an offer for three more books while they were writing this one.  It is exciting because I enjoy this series and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes but there are a couple places in the book where there are visible stretch marks of the book being changed from the thrilling conclusion to now the middle book of the six book saga.

This book, like the previous one, has four characters that are followed from the third person limited perspective.  However, with the exception of Holden, these characters all new (as in the readers didn't even know they existed in the universe before now).  None of them were as well done as Avasarala but I think the average quality of these four is better than those of the previous four.

The combat in this was very cool.  In the first two books, a lot of the combat takes place between ships but in this one it takes place mostly person to person.  While the layout of the battlefield was a little confusing at a couple points, the intricacies of zero gravity combat were well explained.  In addition, this book makes good references to the previous two with the technology and name dropping characters from other books.

There was one plot element that seemed to be basically a red herring, which is fine but it seemed a little like a wasted storytelling opportunity.  In addition, there was a second plot point which appears to have just been dropped.  Perhaps it will be picked up in future books but I have difficulty seeing how that would happen.

I know I spent a lot of page space on complaints here but this book is really pretty good.  It is a lot like the first two but with just enough tweaked to make it exciting and different (and more tweaked than the second one which felt a little like a slightly more complex repeat of the first).

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.