Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 4/5 
 World: 2/5 
 I'll commend this for being a good series thus far. I'm still far from having read all the great books in the science fiction section of the library, but I've read enough to say that series often wear thin, degrade, and fall apart: Pohl's Gateway, Haldeman's Forever War, Niven's Ringworld, Clarke's Rama, Farmer's Riverworld, Cherryh's Chanur...the list could go on. Corey's Expanse started out enjoyably if facile, and it continues to do right most of the things that originally made it fun. They're all space operas, but each adds a little genre twist (view spoiler)[ first detective mystery, then political thriller, and now personal vendetta (hide spoiler)]. 
 I think the writing has vastly improved in this third iteration. It is certainly not poetic or flowing, but it often struck me as being both smart and incisive. The series continues to disappoint me in the wonder category. That's particularly unfortunate here because since this is the book where they tried to draw upon the mystery dangled earlier in the series. If it fizzled and failed to impress here, I'm not sure they're going to manage it much better in the future. Abaddon's Gate did have some character problems that took a lot of looking-the-other-way to make the story coherent. (view spoiler)[ Melba is a preposterous character. In the first few chapters, we might have been able to accept that the combination of wealth, determination, childhood training, and luck got her to where she was, but by then my grudging deference had been exhausted. That she continued to be the jack-of-all-trades, 007 action-superstar introduced an absurdity that blinded much of what else was being shown. (hide spoiler)] I also found Anna to be puzzling. There seemed to be some point there - something about religion or character - but it had evaporated and contradicted itself by the end. A good test for the worthiness of a character is to ask if the experience is notably changed if they are removed. If you left her out of the tale it mostly would have just cut out a hundred or so pages from the book. Bull, however, was a positive addition and a relief. 
 On a personal level, I hated what they did with the Christian religion: turning it into a cultural, New Age, Universalist, tool for therapy. I don't know if that's how the authors see Christianity now or if it is what they're predicting for the future. I'm not even sure if they are aware of how denigrating it was. Without some counterpoint or reflection from the characters its hard to know what Corey was doing here. I suspect it wasn't anything intentional (which makes it worse). 
 Caliban's War read like a television series - segmented and episodic - but Abaddon's Gate is definitely summer movie blockbuster. Looking back on it, far less seems to have occurred and a lot of it was the same thing happening in the same scene. Still, it was just as fun as the others, and I'll happily read more.