Star Trek novelizations rarely do much development on the core ideas of Trek - the liberal Roddenberryist visions, the Federation's ideals in the crucible, and so on.  That makes this novel quite unusual, in that it raises questions about whether mind reading and communication is fundamentally incompatible with the core values of Starfleet and the Federation. A real science fiction question in a Star Trek book?! Wild! Unfortunately it doesn't quite answer this, instead replacing it with an adventure-mystery that leaves the core question unresolved and even, at one point, seems to explicitly end up not wanting to address it at all.  It could have been much more! Oh well, it's fine.