cedar_grove | Starting With This One

The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin.

From product information on Amazon:

As revealed in Last Full Measure Commander Charles 'Trip' Tucker was not killed in an explosion, but rather, his death was staged. With the assistance of Captain Archer and Doctor Phlox, Trip is swept up by the shadowy organization that was employing his best friend, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, and sent deep under cover. After discovering that the Romulans have a new warp drive, faster than any vessel, Starfleet sends Trip to determine if this will be a threat to the new fragile alliance.

The thought that a family oriented man like Trip could just up and disappear, let all those who love him think he was dead is unbelievable enough, compound that with the fact that, with no training whatsoever he manages to survive a deep cover operation where seasoned field operatives are captured and killed and you have a ridiculous scaffold on which the authors could hang themselves... which is a shame, because take Trip out of the equation, you actually have a damn good storyline that would have been better told without Trip as the main protagonist... Malcolm maybe except that he doesn't have the right field of expertise - ie warp drives - but even that would have been a bit of a push... It suffers I think from the trap that many of the Star Trek books have fallen into, and forgets that its readers are intelligent, reasoning human beings.

That said, it is still, in places, a very moving read, particularly with some of the scenes with T'Pol, Trip, or Trip and T'Pol together... albeit in places disturbing. But then, what could possibly untie the knots left by B&B at the premature ending of the show?