Kevin Ryan (1) (1957–)

I was going to give a positive if hardly glowing review for this Star Trek novel but I lost the will to live somewhere around the halfway point. There are just too many character perspectives and I wasn't interested in half of them. Basically, I read these stories, which are my weakness, for the original characters, not the author's creations. Kevin Ryan offers up a fair but fawning depiction of Captain Kirk, makes the redshirts look brave and loyal and has even created an interesting show more Klingon character, but he stretches a minimal plot - granted, the start of a trilogy - too far. Fight scenes run for pages and descriptions get repetitive (Kirk and his hunches). Also, the formatting in my Kindle edition was atrocious, with completely different scenes running seamlessly into each other. So thanks, but I'll pass on part two, even for 99p. show less

I found this book intensely unsatisfying because Picard really didn't go through any kind of character arc—nor did anyone but Lieutenant Barclay, and Barclay's character arc was the SAME arc as it always has to be with him, where he's a scaredy cat who proves himself. Picard is about to negotiate peace with the Gorn, but is thrown back in time to the first encounter with them, where they razed a colony and Kirk fought one of them hand to hand; he watches the colony die, but learns nothing show more and doesn't change his opinions at all. The writing's fine, but I couldn't get over that static feeling. show less

Pfft. Kevin Ryan's ho-hum translation of the season one episode 'Errand of Mercy' has almost finished off my current craze for reading Star Trek novelisations - almost (must give William Shatner's novel a go first). The Klingons are the silliest of the ST alien races, from the name down to the throaty language, and I have absolutely no interest in the intergalactic version of a Patrick O'Brian novel. There are one or two nice moments between Kirk, Spock and Bones, but otherwise this is a show more deadly dull story with no imagination. Perhaps the episode is more entertaining! show less

After Kevin Ryan's Errand of Vengeance trilogy was released over two months, it took almost four years for all the books of its followup, Errand of Fury to come out. Though it's neat to get the buildup to the Klingon/Federation War in "Errand of Mercy", what we actually get here is the same as the previous volumes in both Errand series: Kirk and his valiant security forces fight some Klingons in a bloody battle and win. The second half of the book actually novelizes "Errand of Mercy", but show more aside from a couple scenes of the Enterprise in space, adds nothing of any interest. We might as well have stuck with James Blish. Meanwhile, Lieutenant West does something that has no bearing on the plot; if his side-story was intended to show how he would become the paranoid conspirator we saw in The Undiscovered Country, it failed. Indeed, Ryan's characterizations-- of the Enterprise crew, other Starfleet officers, and various Klingons alike-- are rudimentary at best. show less