Star Trek - The Next Generation: Crossover (Book On CD)

Crossover is definitely one of Michael Jan Friedman's best Trek stories. Given that he is the most prolific of the many Trek authors, he has attained a level in writing these stories that is both fluid and highly intriguing. Taking cues from a few different Star Trek The Next Generation episodes, where Star Trek The Original Series characters are brought into the twenty fourth century, Michael Jan Friedman carefully crafts a well told STNG story around them.

The premise:

As fans of Star Trek The Next Generation learned in "Reunification part II" Ambassador Spock decided to stay on Romulus to help teach members of the Reunification movement the ways of Vulcans. While on a trip to one of the Romulan Star Empires outlying worlds to instruct Reunificationists in the ways of Surak, Spock is captured by that world's governor. Fortunately for Spock, the governor doesn't initially know who he has in his possession.

As Starfleet learns of Ambassador Spocks capture, they dispatch the...Read more

Croosover is one of those books that you can't put down. (I finished it in two days.) It was a page turner that kept you the edge of your pants and you never wanted it to stop. The story revoles around spock. He is working on his mission for Unifiing (sp) the Vulcans and the Romulans. He gets captured by the romulans and he find out that it was because of a spy. (I'm not going to tell you who because it would ruin the book for you.) Starfleet finds this out and sends the Enterprise-D to negotiate the Unificationist's release. They send a rep to help. That rep is Admiral Leonard H. McCoy. Meanwhile Scotty (Who is flying around in his shuttle) overhears the messege from Starfleet and he divises his own rescue plan. It is the various plotlines and characters the keep you reading. I grade it *Burns a five on to the side of a cow* A FIVE! By the way, if you were wondering what the best ST novel I have read. It is "Fallen Heroes" (ST: DS9 book no. 5)

I'm very choosy about what gets a five-star rating rather than a four; if I wasn't, this book would have been rated five stars. (Admittedly, if I was rating the layout and copyediting job done on the mass-market paperback edition, it would have been lucky to get two stars; I've rarely seen such a sloppy job. NUMEROUS lines throughout the book are missing their first (or, occasionally, last) letters; page fifty alone is missing five first letters out of 30 lines, and while most of the book isn't THAT bad, it isn't the only page that has a problem, but cutting down a rating of a story for sloppy layout is unfair; still, I'm loath to give a high rating to such a sloppy book without a disclaimer. Hopefully, later editions corrected the problem, but I wouldn't count on it.)

The characters were handled marvellously, especially Scotty, who is given his due in a way that he was NOT in the episode/book that brought him into the Next Generation world, "Relics"; the plot works well...Read more