It's taken me literally months to read this; it just couldn't hold my attention. Doesn't mean that it's awful - it isn't - but there's not enough character work in here to appeal to me, I think. The basic concept of the book, in a nutshell, is that a giant life-destroying laser beam has been directed at a colony planet that's under the protection of the Enterprise, and Kirk and company have to figure out how to stop it. This sounds like it should be pretty exciting, and credit where it's due the last 20 odd pages actually are exciting - at least mildly so. But for the most part all I remember of this book, having only just finished it, is a tendency to technobabble. Star Trek is fairly notorious for this, I know, but I've never thought it's done much in service of story and that's the case here.