Los kreel -una etnia muy primitiva y de costumbres guerreras- descubren en un misterioso planeta un depósito de armas tan poderosas y mortíferas como jamas hubieran soñado. El descubrimiento anima a los belicosos kreel a atacar a sus vecinos y rivales, los klingon. El casus belli será la posesión del planeta donde hallaron el deposito de armas. La Enterprise es enviada para hacer un esfuerzo de mediación entre los contendientes y, de paso, averiguar el origen de los artefactos bélicos. Para el comandante Picard y sus hombres se plantea un difícil reto: evitar que el fuego de la guerra devaste toda la galaxia...

I have a hard time assessing this book because I'm currently in the midst of watching Deep Space Nine and enjoying the ways that Klingons are characterized there. I don't know how I would feel about it otherwise. The Kreel I can confirm that I don't love: they are excruciatingly one dimensional, and I just don't believe that everybody would see a single alien race in exactly the same way. Or if they do, it seems like it ought to (in Trek fashion) be a way to teach us a ~lesson~ about how that which seems foulest can be fairest, right? And part of this story seemed to be going down that path - there's an "elven" character who initially seems great and then turns out to be awful - but it didn't, and I'm not sure whether it would have been too cliche if it had, or if it ought to have... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This is a character development driven novel. Peter David does an excellent job of providing scenes that flesh out small gaps in the back-story of characters and gaps between television episodes. I thought the dialogue between Data and Dr. Pulaski were very good. ( )

Reading this proves that Peter David has improved tremedously as a writer in the past 15 years. He's my favorite Star Trek writer (along with Diane Duane), but in this one there was little to set him apart from the rest of them. I'd say "nothing," but even in this early work you see traces of the humor that permeates even the darkest of his works.

The title has very little to do with the story. ( )