Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice by David Mack
The fifth book in the excellent Vanguard series, Precipice continues the excellent storytelling that makes this series worth reading. Sort of like ‘DS9 during TOS’ Precipice takes a somewhat darker and more long-term story arc approach to telling its story than typical TOS-era stories. There’s several inter-linking storylines during the book and, like any big story arc, it will be really hard to understand if this is your first Vanguard novel so I’d start at the beginning. However, if you’ve read the other Vanguard books this may well be the best one yet. In this book, Cervantes Quinn goes against his usual character to help fight the Klingons a la Errand of Mercy; Diego Reyes is kidnapped by the Klingons and brought to a much younger Gorkon; and Tim Pennington and T’Prynn go off on an adventure together despite their earlier mishaps. Finally, Carol Marcus and Ming Xiong study the mysterious Mirdonyae artifact.
Like most of David Mack’s books, the writing is crisp and not overly flowery as some Trek authors can tend to be on occasion. The book ends with a cliffhanger which is annoying, but to be expected for a book part of a series like this. Overall, this is a solid outing in the Vanguard series and fans of the earlier works can expect the same high quality here they’ve seen in earlier books in the series.
Score: 8 out of 10.
Reviewer: Daniel Handlin