cedar_grove | The Second of a Pair

What Price Honor by Dave Stern

From product information on Amazon:

The Starship Enterprise NX-01 is humanity's flagship -- the first vessel to begin a systematic exploration of what lies beyond the fringes of known space. Led by Captain Jonathan Archer, eighty of Starfleet's best and brightest set forth to pave humanity's way among the stars. Tempered by a year's worth of exploration, they are a disciplined, cohesive unit. But now one of their number has fallen.

Bad enough that Ensign Alana Hart is dead. Worse still that she died while attempting to sabotage the Enterprise -- and at the hands of Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, the ship's armory officer and her nominal superior. Even as questions swirl around Hart's death, Archer, Reed, and the rest of the Enterprise crew find themselves caught squarely in the middle of another tense situation- a brutal war of terror between two civilizations.

But in the Eris Alpha system, nothing -- and no one -- are what they seem. And before the secret behind Ensign Hart's demise is exposed, Reed will be forced to confront death one more time.

What can I say about this...? I enjoyed it, it was a reasonably good read, the characterisation, while not completely spot on was close enough, for the most part. Perhaps Reed was not quite as sharp as his own self, but I suppose this was a literary device to allow the readers to figure things out as they went along too. Predictable, perhaps, but the most annoying thing, the most irritating tendency on the part of the writers was to ram the 'important' facts down the readers throats by repeating them two or three times. Star Trek audiences are smart people... for the most part I have found this to be true, and the books do tend to 'write down' to them.

While focussed around Lt Reed and his affairs, the story was ensemble enough to feel a little like an additional episode of Enterprise, which was, I suppose, a refreshing thought. :) It could have been a little sharper, but on the whole, enjoyable enough.