Author Dayton Ward seems to have a knack for describing landmarks, directions and actions, unlike Kirsten Beyer who excels with writing dialogue. Characterization suffered as a consequence and many characters fell flat from stereotyping.
The excerpts inserted between chapters of the book slowed the pace down considerably, even though they offered a different perspective of what happened on Tarsus IV.
Also, I wasn’t expecting to find the teenage James Kirk in this book because it doesn’t gel with his timeline in the Star Trek film tie-in novel.
Most of the Starfleet officers who appeared in Drastic Measures were pretty useless. Outgunned, outwitted and outmaneuvered, it appeared like they were unprepared to deal with the resurgence of Kodos and his gang. Many times, the Starfleet officers should have acted decisively to disable their adversaries but chose to be hampered by misplaced sympathy.
Captain Korrapati, in particular, was pretty much like a helpless bystander throughout the entire saga. He didn’t come up with anything useful during times of conflict and his overly cautious approach almost impeded his subordinates’ plans.
As the ranking officer on Tarsus IV during the crisis, Korrapati also didn’t seem resourceful. For instance, why didn’t he think of using the shuttle transport to go up the mountains if Pakaski team planned to use that to pick up Kodos? True, there was a ban on using the shuttle transport from the spaceport, but he could have requested Governor Ribiero (who was returned to power after Kodos fled) to rescind the ban for that purpose.
In addition, the book would benefit from better proofreading. A huge chunk of text was repeated on one of the pages.
And in the sentence below, the word should be “reign”, not “rein”.
“Following his retirement as the director of the New Anchorage hospital system, less than ten years after the brief yet unforgettable rein of Governor Adrian Kodos, Eames and his wife, Imani, left Tarsus IV in search of a new beginning.”
