Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (4.5 stars)

An epic space opera meets detective story written by a pair of authors under the pen name "James S.A. Corey".  It's a bit like Firefly meets Takeshi Kovacs, but without the beautiful grit and lyrical writing of Richard K. Morgan.  In fact the writing itself isn't really remarkable at all, but the world building is great, the plot is interesting, and the main characters are fairly well defined and far from perfect.

It also has a special quality that makes it stand out from many other space operas that start strong: it doesn't dissolve into tedium or get trapped on a single planet after one book.  I've read the four books (not counting side stories) published so far, and Corey has maintained an impressive tempo, continued to expand the world scale, and solidly kept my interest across all of the books.  This is actually more impressive than just considering the merits of each individual novel, so I gave it an extra half star.

In this book the two main characters are well developed and face a great and meaningful moral conflict about the merits of releasing potentially destructive information, with Holden and Miller taking opposing views.  The other characters were fairly underdeveloped, but this improves as the series moves on.

The protomolecule is badass and takes some genuinely surprising turns, and generates at least a couple of "woah" moments for me.  The scenes on Eros and on the ship seen through Julie's eyes reminded me of Event Horizon a little, stepping into the horror genre.  I think this section would have been vastly improved without the "vomit zombies" which dropped me out of a feeling of suspense into farce.

The science in the sci-fi mostly takes a back seat.  He's fairly vague about the "Epstein drive" which made travel in the solar system practical, but there's one thing Corey is very particular about: gravity.
We're constantly reminded about the effects of acceleration and deceleration on humans inside ships, how spin influenced space station (or planetery colony) design, how hard it is to move around in low G, how much "belters" struggle in Earth-like gravity, how magnetic boots work during EVAs, and many many more things gravity-related besides.  I actually liked all this: it adds a hard science element back into a world that would otherwise need very little explanation because most technology is fairly near future (sans Epstein drive).

Strong start to a strong series.

4.5 stars.