Customer Reviews

DEATH'S ANGEL (A Star Trek Novel)

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It's not the worst Star Trek book I've read but it's close.

The author seems to have no feel at all for the characters, especially the Vulcans. She has Sarek throwing temper tantrums and wallowing in self pity. She has Spock in loud, heated arguments over politics. She has Kirk proposing marriage to someone he met a few days before. She attempts to imply that the basis for the mystery might explain the actions of Spock and Kirk but there's no excuse for Sarek. It's also interesting that nobody seems to think Spock becoming hyperemotional is at all out of the ordinary.

The basic premise is laughable. The solution to the mystery relied on science/biology that was absolutely absurd, even by Star Trek standards.

The author proceeds to invent dozens of new races, all increasingly silly from 3 meter long lobsters to 7 feet tall Koala bears ( who even eat Eucalyptus leaves ). Throw in a shapeshifting race that becomes more active when it has energy available, such as as sunlight and food, who allegedly could convert the entire output of the Enterprise's engine into a shape shift. Something about the concept of an organic lifeform taking the full power of the warp engines through it's body strikes me as silly.

The author then manages to create an entire parallel agency in the Federation that sounds suspiciously like the Judge Dredd concept of law enforcement agents with a license to kill. They even dress in all black with gold trim.

Overall it seems that there was a massive failure of imagination by the author. She merely threw in a variety of previously used concepts and dumped it out into the reader's lap.

All in all a very poor book.

Honestly and sincerely, if you love Star Trek, skip this one.

For me, the fun of reading Trek novels is the characterization. I can deal with thin plots and even hackneyed writing because it's so enjoyable to have that sense of reunion with the characters. OK, everyone's here, let's have a little adventure. But in this book, I have no idea who these people are.

The main character in Death's Angel is a woman who appears to me to be a clear Mary Sue (wish-fulfillment stand-in for the author). Now I like a good Mary Sue as much as the next fan, but this one is used in a really mean-spirited way. To play arm-chair psychologist, I'd say the author may have been working out some pretty serious issues with men in this book. The character comes in with a lot of power (from an authority source we've never heard of, by the way, so she's not even part of the familiar -- and potentially subvertable -- Starfleet structure). And she then gains and uses power over all the main male characters. Someone else pointed out the odd subplot of Kirk popping the question. But even odder is the way she lords that over McCoy in a very nasty so-there sort of way. And the indignities she visits on Spock are not even worthy of repeating.

The whole thing feels polluted and wrong to me. It's easily one of the worst books I've read, in or out of the Star Trek universe. Ugh.

Kathleen Sky has the characters down pat. A well thought out well written mystery that will keep you guessing to the very end.