The Captain's Peril

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Shatner goes back to basics and it's one of his best. - Rated
After the grand space operatics of William Shatner's previous Trek novels, which weave galaxy-hungry villains with familiar characters from all corners of the Trek franchise, he comes back down to earth (or, more accurately, Bajor) for this, his seventh Trek novel. Giving himself a much smaller canvas on which to paint, Shatner nonetheless crafts one of his best stories yet - a relatively short, tense murder mystery that strips away all the Starfleet hardware and unnecessary cross-over Trek cameos and proves once and for all that Shatner can create classic Star Trek adventure.

Kirk and Picard, vacationing on Bajor shortly before the events of "Star Trek: Nemesis", find themselves caught up in mystery - a group of Bajoran scientists are being killed one by one. Cut off from Deep Space Nine and without their 24th century technology, the two captains must work together in a situation where everyone is a suspect.

The premise is simple, but brought to life superbly by Shatner's terse, no-nonsense narrative style and his supremely confident grasp of the lead characters. Having played Kirk for so long, it's hardly surprising that he writes him better than anyone else, but his Picard rings just as true - I could easily visualize Patrick Stewart speaking the lines.

This small-scale, more character driven story was obviously not enough to flesh "Captain's Peril" out to novel length and there is a parallel story (which alternates chapters with the main plot) in which Kirk relates to Picard the tale of an early mission aboard the original Enterprise. It's just as well-written but doesn't grip the reader in the same way as the main plot, perhaps because it's not really what we (or I, anyway) buy the Shatner novels for.

The novel ends on a slight cliffhanger, a small taste of what we can expect from Shatner's next novel, "Captain's Blood", which, it seems, will see a return to the grand space opera of his past novels. So "Captain's Peril" may just be a vacation between more epic novels, but it's no less enjoyable for it.