This book had a lot of promise but unfortunately didn't live up to it. It opened well, I was interested in the characters, the setting and the plot (especially the mystery). Unfortunately, these were not well-developed as the plot went on and became something of a slog by the end. There were certainly plenty of good moments, but nothing particularly great or special.



Part of the problem was Miller's crime noir plot. The problem is that if you've read one noir plot, you've read them all. His plot was predictable, unoriginal and I found it hard to care about someone who cared so little about themselves. A world-weary alcoholic cop obsessed with a beautiful missing girl he hopes to rescue (and hopes she will rescue him) is an over-used cliche (why does the girl always have to be beautiful, would he not care if she was ugly?). Miller was best when he had someone else to bounce off, alone he was just too miserable. Also the obsession over Julia was really weird, the ending tried to make it sound noble, but it was just creepy.



Holden was better, especially as he had a crew to interact with, but these characters never got much depth to them. The world-building was similarly shallow and half-hearted, there was no nuance or shades to political struggle. Making Earth one unified blob without any diversity of opinion or action just seemed lazy. Making cities/stations where everything is dreary and decadent gets repetitive and dull. The villain was cartoonishly evil and just lazy. There were also a few holes in the plot and timeline.



However, what really made this a 3 star book was the ending. Without spoiling anything, throwing alien/zombie/hivemind/extermination was really out of place and didn't work well at all. By the end it got so absurd that I couldn't take it seriously. Even the characters comment on how bizarre it was and how it resembled magic, which is a bad sign (if you're writing hard sci-fi things have to make at least some sense). A lot of mystery novels put so much work into building the mystery that when the final reveal comes it's anti-climatic and that's how the ending felt to this.