The Mercy of Gods

I thought I'd give it a try getting in at the ground floor for the next James S.A. Corey saga, considering I am a big fan of The Expanse show (and a slow reader of some of the novels). But I am not really into multi-novel scifi sagas, and reading The Mercy of Gods just made that clear to me. It reads like a long prologue. And it didn't hook me enough to be curious about the second. It clearly doesn't have the emotional stakes The Expanse saga had, with its closeness to Earth.

This one is more of a intergalactic zoo setup, and while I enjoyed the world building, the slowness with which some of the plot enfolded, made me rather nitpicky about the setup (It's normal for science results to be replicated in multiple labs, why did they all act like that was such a problem? How are they all able to breathe the same air? How can they perfectly replicate laboratory equipment, while failing to replicate shower and doors?).

And hey, guess what, at the end it's a ragtag team of ~4 guys and 1 girl. Sounds familiar?