Book Review – Star Trek: Missing In Action
Author: Peter David
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2006
When the U.S.S. Excalibur is pulled into a strange region of space that defies our known lays of physics they must struggle to return home. Meanwhile, the U.S.S. Trident disregards Starfleet orders to try to find them, and possible stop a war.
My latest book review is “Missing In Action” by Peter David, from the Star Trek New Frontier series. This book brought something with it that no other book I’ve reviews so far has…expectation. I am familiar with Peter David’s work and have a certain expectation when I see his name on the cover of a Star Trek book.
This is also the second book I have reviewed that was the latter book in a series, where I had to review out of context of the larger series. As in the first case, when that did not work out too well for me, these are by and large new characters. I was very curious as to whether I could get into the flow of the storyline and the characters coming in in the middle of a story and quite a few novels in in terms of character development.
This book had me from the first sentence. It left a jaw dropper on the last page as a way of saying goodbye, and was highly entertaining at all points in between. That this book was able to engage me so was a tribute to how well written the characters and stories were, as I had to break this book up into smaller bites than I normally prefer to read, especially for review, over the course of several weeks. The story had all the plots hooks, early and throughout, and the well done characterizations that I’ve come to anticipate in a Peter David novel. It’s why I consider him my favorite Star Trek author. He lived up to that expectation.
We did see two familiar characters from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Commander (now Admiral) Elizabeth Shelby, who we first saw on-board the Enterprise as the Borg Specialist and as Captain Riker’s first officer in the Best of Both Worlds episodes, and Ensign (now Lieutenant Commander) Rose Leffler, who developed a relationship with Wesley Crusher in the episode The Game. Many fans also recall her fondly as she was played in the episode by Ashley Judd in one of the early roles of her career. In a smaller role at least in this book, we also saw Dr. Selar, who was a Vulcan doctor aboard the Enterprise in at least one early ST: TNG episode.
As he’s done in past novels, David took small characters from the Star Trek universe that we know and greatly expanded upon them. Once the reader has someone to initially care about, then he builds a well fleshed out cast around them. I was very impressed with the characters. I was able to get a feel for them quickly, and it was easy to see that there was a well-entwined web of relationships among them. I could feel the depth and complexity of the relationships, even though I had none of the material of earlier books to understand the specifics. I didn’t feel like I needed it. I thought that perhaps the dialogue was a bit more sarcastic in places for what I’d expect on a Starfleet vessel. However, it was pretty clear throughout that we were dealing with operating procedures far from the formality of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
There was definitely the feel of a morality tale at play in the story though. There were definitely some bad things that happened to good people. In the end, people reaped what they had sown. It was nice to see some characters operating in that gray area between the black and white of “wrong” and “right”. There were always some complaints that the crew of the Enterprise-D were “goodie two-shoes.” To borrow from the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system it gets a little boring when the heroes are always Lawful Good. These characters were definitely not hamstrung by that and I enjoyed seeing characters act in ways that weren’t always boringly “Starfleet”.
So to sum it up, if you want to read some Star Trek with characters that are not all the same ones you’ve seen on TV for a 100+ episodes of a particular show this book, and these characters, would be for you. If you’re already a Peter David fan I think this book is yet another of his outstanding works. I’d also like to add that based upon my enjoyment of these characters and this book as I was reading I have already picked up a couple earlier books in the New Frontier series so I can begin filling in some of the background that I’ve missed.
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