I don't have the faintest idea why this has the cover it does, because there's certainly no such scene in the book. Kirk has an encounter with a wild animal, but I guess that "Vulcan" in the title means that Spock gets put on the cover, regardless of how flagrantly deceptive it is. I suppose an image of him sitting at a computer, which is what he does for the bulk of the story here, would be deemed too boring. I wasn't bored. It was a fun story, with some good character work, especially of Sarek, and every so often it's nice to have a more contained story in the franchise books, rather than big space battles and so forth. This is a murder mystery set in a science school, and it zips along easily. I will say, however, that the murderer is blatantly obvious pretty much from the get go, and nearly the entirety of the book was waiting for everyone else to realise it.

Nice to see the first meeting between McCoy and Dr. M'Benga, though, and how the latter ends up working on the Enterprise.