Book one was a noir. This is a political thriller, and the shift is deliberate.
The protomolecule moves into the background and the real question becomes what governments decide to do with it. Avasarala arrives and immediately becomes the best thing in the series, an old woman swearing her way through UN politics who understands power better than anyone else in these books.
Read June 2023, five months after the first. The gaps closed quickly after this one.
