The first thing I noticed, picking this book off the shelf, was the enormous lag time between volumes in the story. I actually remembered nothing about the first book, or for that matter, the entire trilogy that came before it, back during the very short “reboot” of the TOS novels that were supposed to focus on the crew instead of the command staff. It had something to do with Klingons, I recalled, and the whole idea of sleeper agents surgically altered to resemble humans.
The second thing I noticed, about 30 pages into the book, was how little that first thing mattered. It took very little time to get the gist of what had happened to bring about the crisis at the heart of the tale, and while some of the details were clearly meant to resonate with information from the first volume, I didn’t feel like I’d missed too much of the context.
That’s a hard balance to strike, as I’ve mentioned countless times before. If it’s too self-referential and complex, the long wait between books can be a chore or frustrating, depending on how well the author weaves the exposition into the early chapters. This time, the author did a great job. The book was never boring and the various pieces of the puzzle were very clearly identified, keeping the tensions high and the mysteries coherent.
The third thing I noticed, about halfway through the book, was how short it was. Granted, I’ve been reading large anthologies or longer franchise material lately, but this still felt short. A lot of that is the strength of the writing, since so much is happening that the pages seem to melt away. But it’s also standard tie-in length, which is sometimes less than satisfying. But why complain when a strong story about TOS leaves me wishing for more?
Rating: 8/10
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