Leviathan Wakes

Pros: fun, fast, engaging. A good scope: there's lots of sci-fi that's just a little in the future, like the Martian, or way far in the future, like Star Wars / Trek, but this is in between, and that's a neat time to focus on. It gets it right that if we meet alien life of some sort, it's very likely to be so foreign to us that we can't even conceive of what it is (Arrival or Annihilation, not little green men).

Cons: Not the deepest character development out there, but that's not what it's trying to be