Diane Duane wrote a Star Trek novel called My Enemy, My Ally alternating between the viewpoints of Captain Kirk and a female officer commanding a Romulan Warbird. She later collaborated with her husband on a sequel called The Romulan Way. Those books both came out in the 80s. Recently she returned to the plotline that had been started in those books with another story of Commander Ael t'Rllaillieu who is rebelling against the corrupt regime that currently dominates the Romulan Empire.
When Duane started on her sequel, someone decided to reprint the first two books from the 80s and call the whole group the Rihannsu series. The first was Rihannsu Book 1, the second was Rihannsu Book 2, and the next was Rihannsu Book 3.
I gave Book 1 five stars, Book 2 four stars, and then the ratings plummeted as I only gave one little star to Book 3. You can check my reviews on them at the following URLs.
http://www.epinions.com/content_15981514372/tk_~CB003.1.74
http://www.epinions.com/content_18965171844/tk_~CB003.1.38
http://www.epinions.com/content_31817567876
Why the sudden drop on the third one? Book 3 was priced as it if were a full novel, but it was really just the first five chapters of a story. This one has the next chapters, numbered Six through Nine. In a way, that's a sign of honesty - it shows that Diane Duane is fully aware that she is writing a single novel which just happens to be released to us in tiny installments. She is not making any real effort to convince us that the separately-packaged "Book 3" and "Book 4" are each entitled to be called "novels", or even that the two of them put together are entitled to be called a complete novel. The last words of Chapter Nine are: To be continued . . .
Based on her past habits, I estimate the complete story will have about 20 chapters (that's what My Enemy, My Ally had), which would mean that we are essentially halfway through what should have been published as one fat volume instead of an estimated total of four skinny and overpriced specimens misleadingly called "Books 3, 4, 5, and 6." People who had past experience with Duane's work (including non-Trek stuff) would reasonably expect that anything called a "book" that had her name on it would be a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it was simultaneously developing some extended plot threads for further use in a sequel. That's what I thought when I spotted "Book 3" and "Book 4" in a bookstore a few months ago and immediately spent fourteen bucks (plus tax) to obtain them for my very own, having been waiting for a decade or so to see her "Rihannsu" (meaning Romulan) storyline continued.
I might add that I estimate this book, billed as having 220 pages, would actually only have about 150 or so if the pages had the normal number of words on them instead of approximately 2/3 of what you reasonably expect when you buy a paperback novel. (I gave further details in my review of Book 3, still available at the URL provided above.)
So first I've warned you that this book is essentially a scam and I was suckered into it. I certainly hope you intend to avoid following my example, but I imagine you'd all complain if I failed to give you any details of just what happens in this book.
Representatives of the Federation and the Romulan Empire are meeting in a neutral spot for a peace conference. Kirk and his ship are naturally part of the Federation contingent. The Ambassador is a character revived from an episode of the original TV series, of course. Ael has another mind-meld experience with Spock. The Federation spy who was a major viewpoint character in The Romulan Way and was unexpectedly voted into their Imperial Senate at the end of it finally manages to slip a message to McCoy at a social gathering during the conference, then another one later. Thus far no one has figured out her background was carefully faked when she was surgically disguised as a Romulan and inserted into their society, but now that she's a Senator someone is likely to go through her life story with a fine-toothed comb looking for anything that could be used against her, and sooner or later they'll notice how difficult it is to find anyone who remembers knowing her when she was just a cute little girl, and the house of cards will collapse. We have the obligatory space battle at the end as the peace talks collapse. Ael takes her ship Bloodwing tearing off across the Neutral Zone toward her native empire, and Kirk is ordered to catch up with her and persuade her to come back before she starts a war or something. If she won't cooperate, he is to come right back for a new assignment. Commodore Danilov tells Kirk to confirm for the record that he understands and will comply fully with those orders. At this point in their little chat, Kirk, showing his usual vast regard for orders from on high, looks over at Uhura and asks pointedly, "What happened to the signal, Lieutenant?" Uhura says, "We seem to have lost it, Captain." (I assume she's just all broken up about this tragic technical malfunction that prevented Kirk from promising to come running back home as soon as possible, but hey, what can she do?) As the installment ends, the two ships are heading off to carry out some secret plan of Ael's in a certain Romulan system.
That's all very well and good, but it's not worthy of separate publication. Imagine if George Lucas had divided The Phantom Menace as four separate "movies", each one about 30 minutes long, and then distributed the first and second without even making any promises on when the third and fourth portions would be released. Would you be willing to buy full-price tickets for Parts 1 and 2, or would you decide to wait until Lucasfilm finally recovered its scruples and its sanity and spliced it all together on a videotape?
Now, to be fair, I don't want you thinking Duane has forgotten anything she ever knew on how to write effective prose. This book and the previous one are undoubtedly the best-written material I have ever slapped a one-star rating onto. What there is of it.
To give you a sample of Duane's respect for the continuity (such as it was) of the original series, and her skill with dialogue, I'll quote a bit from early in this book where Commodore Danilov is making a point to Jim Kirk why Starfleet is a bit concerned about the possible consequences of Jim's strong friendship with a Romulan Commander (even a renegade one).
"Starship captains are selected for stability, we both know that. But there's a galaxy full of unknowns out there, not to mention the ones at the bottom of the human mind . . . and things that can't always be predicted do happen. In a ship of this class, it's hard to avoid thinking of Matt Decker."
"Matt was a one-off."
"Garth of Izar."
"That wasn't his fault. The alien treatment that saved his life-"
"Ron Tracey."
Jim grimaced.
"Jim," Danilov said, "we may or may not be a breed apart, but when starship commanders go off the rails, we do it spectacularly."
For those of you who aren't thoroughly conversant with the guest stars of the Classic Trek shows, the three Federation starship captains referred to above were important characters in the episodes titled "The Doomsday Machine", "Whom Gods Destroy", and "The Omega Glory", respectively.
Likewise, I can say very nice things about the detailed portrayal of futuristic medical science in a scene near the very end of this installment, when "Bones" McCoy is frantically performing emergency heart surgery on a Romulan statesman who took a disintegrator bolt to the chest during an assassination attempt staged by another Romulan faction.
Put the entire story into one book and I'm sure it would merit five stars unless Duane has something surprisingly stupid planned for the grand finale. Which means that if Pocket finally does arrange to publish the finished work in a single volume, we'll have the bizarre situation where I will have rated the individual components of a story with one star apiece, and then I'll have turned around and given five stars to the exact same material in a different format. Stay tuned to see what happens! (In the meantime, I'm posting this review because it recently occurred to me that it had been two months since the last time I did any one-star ratings, and I didn't want people thinking I was getting too soft-hearted to keep doing it.)
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