I've read this right after Churn. If someone is starting from scratch, I'd suggest reading the prequel short stories first. 
 Setup: We have humanity in its first phase of spreading out into the Solar system. It follows tha "Star Wars" style of battered, oily spaceships full of patches, built from whatever they have. We have crime. We have narrow minded people, easily influenced by politicians. Ethics could barely fit into a Benetton commercial with all their colours, that change as powers shift. In short: Just as today, but scattered over a large space. 
 Sci-fi: This is not a hard sci-fi, but reasonably well built. The authors introduced the Epstein drive to make the world viable the way they set it up and most of the story is "practical". Not too many details, but few mistakes that would make you hiss. As the story is driven by politics, noir style investigation and some space adventure, I found it well balanced. 
 Things that I liked: 
 - Clearly meant to be a series, but with only a reasonable amount of cliffhangers at the end. 
 - Nice parallelism of Holden and Miller. Idealism manifesting in sharing vs. cinism manifesting in personal manipulation (aka "I'm the only person I trust, and I will decide what I share and who should know what.") 
 - A believable social structure over the whole system. 
 Things that I didn't like: 
 - Characters sometimes don't see obvious things. (I'm talking about characters who are obviously, and otherwise intelligent.) 
 - Holden's crew is made up of strong personalities, yet on many occasions, they just meld into the situation. (The TV series is more believable in this.) 
 - Not outright "didn't like", but I have some concerns about how the protomolecule thing develops.