Leviathan Wakes

Its place in The Expanse

Leviathan Wakes is book 1 in the The Expanse series. It is followed by Caliban's War. See the full The Expanse reading order.

Two hundred years from now, humanity has spread across the solar system — Earth, a crowded and politically fractious Mars, and the asteroid Belt, whose miners and dockworkers live under the thumb of both. When a conspiracy on an ice hauler triggers a chain of events involving a missing girl, a protomolecule that rewrites the rules of biology, and the fragile balance between three rival powers, a rag-tag salvage crew on the gunship Rocinante and a jaded Belter detective get pulled into events that will decide…