This book begins the final long arc of story in the Expanse series. Being that the streaming series on Prime never covered these books, this was my first experience of the series that was not overly colored by the filmed versions, though of course the faces of the actors remained in my head while I was reading. In this final trilogy of novels (I think it’s fair to think of them that way since they are unified and tell a complete and separate story) the series moves away from solar system politics that were a bit simplistic at times into a grander arena. The Laconians, who began as a splinter group of the Martian navy, reappear with alien tech drawn from their study of the ruins of the ancient aliens and sweep through the ring space and the Sol system with unstoppable force. The image of the single battleship that wreaks havoc on the navies of Earth and Mars is rather fine, and unsettling in a way that felt more visceral than I expected. It was as though I was reading about the conquest of my actual home. This is an impressive feat of speculative storytelling and indicates how deeply the books have affected me even when I quarreled with them. At the same time the story depicts the aging of the Rocinante family and all the other characters in the series, given that there is a long time gap between book six and book seven. And the book takes us to Laconia, which is the culture built in the intervening decades by the Martian colonists; the use of the word “Laconia” and the reference to the culture of Sparta indicates the ambitions of Duarte and his followers, but the actual setting of Laconia is complex. Duarte himself is a better antagonist that many of the others in the series, even with his ambition and delusion. The deepening of what we learn about the older race of sentients who built all the ruins and sent the protomolecule to Earth in the long-ago is also sharp. This novel is the writers hitting on all cylinders.