Book review
Written by David Mack
Pocket Books paperback
Release date 9 December 2010

When the Breen steal the plans for Starfleet’s slipstream drive, Dr. Julian Bashir has to go undercover on one of the notoriously paranoid race’s worlds…

While Trek is often thought of primarily as space opera, the format is flexible enough to allow for everything from hard SF – the Titan series especially – to a spy thriller in space, which is what David Mack has produced for the first of four novels chronicling the Federation’s dealings with the Typhon Pact.

The set up is consciously reminiscent of the Cold War – the Federation and its allies against a “Warsaw Pact” of aligned alien races – with leaps in technology vital to both sides. Into this comes DS9’s hidden genius, Julian Bashir, older now, but not necessarily wiser than he was when he played 007 games on the holodeck. He’s partnered with an old love, fellow augmented genius Sarina Douglas, but as with the best of the spy genre, nothing is quite as it appears.

Mack deftly handles the various plot strands, and provides some thrilling action sequences, including a chase through a crowded city and a seat-of-the-pants rescue (with a lovely tip of the hat to the 2009 Star Trek movie casually thrown in). Peter Quentin

VERDICT: 8/10
A great start to the latest 24th Century adventures.

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