Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders chapter 24

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

Tonight’s chapter is short, but so is my time. Five pages will have to suffice, as the next chapter is a more acceptable chapter length by my review standards. In the previous chapter, McCoy…learned a bit about how Sarek and Amanda met.

I hate to repeat myself, but as great as the character pars were I kind of wish Lorrah had come up with a different plot that would have allowed me to focus on them. Even making the story about the still experimental procedure itself would have allowed for what Lorrah seems to actually want to do here without the distraction of the murder subplot. That’s kind of my issue. The title of the book should be about the plot, not the subplot, and that’s what the murders have become. I know Lorrah could have just made this a medical drama within the Star Trek framework, because that’s what she did in The IDIC Epidemic, the follow-up that was the novel I read first and enjoyed enough to go back and find The Vulcan Academy Murders. If memory serves, and I do still own the novel and may do it for a future Chapter By Chapter if I and the Spotlight are around that long, the plot involved a disease that affected mixed race–as in races of different planets, not someone with a different shade of melanin but still from the same planet and thus the same race in Star Trek and my eyes–people. The race was on to find a cure, but there was character drama among xenophobes and among the medical staff. It challenged the limits of “infinite diversity in infinite combination” but stayed focus on the plot and how it affected the characters.

Here, the murders have become an afterthought. Every now and then Lorrah remembers it but then it goes away again to focus on building Vulcan lore and the romance story going on. All of that has been really good, though creating canon lore in a non-canon story, which most novels are, is always an iffy move at best. Let’s see how this all plays out in this short chapter.

Now you’re just messing with me, aren’t you, Jean?

Last time I thought the investigation would resume and it was more character and lore stuff. This time I expected more character and lore stuff and they actually resumed the investigation. Remember, I write the intros in this series before I read the chapter for authenticity. Here’s an example of why I do that. It makes things more interesting if I’m proven right or wrong as to what’s about to happen as I head in.

The chapter start with Kirk getting showered, finding something that helps with the burns, and then talks to Sarek. He brings up what I did last time, that if Amanda is the target she’s in real danger now that the murderer has managed to cover his or her tracks, which Stonn, the “Scotty if Vulcan” of the Academy and hospital that we’ve seen a few times in this story, confirms seems to be the case. The hacker tried to reroute power to the computer memory bank to overload and fry it, but overdid it and that caused the fire. So it could be that the fire was unintentional. Even the Vulcans are convinced now that murder most foul is going on, and they’re going to leave Amanda on the backup systems, which aren’t connected to the computer network. So if someone wants to kill Amanda they’re going to need to find a new way. It’s also hoped that if this is just attempting to discredit Sorel and Corrigan’s process that his showing up to investigate will be an extra deterrent. Of course, if she is the target and this is the killer’s last chance before they wake her…

I’m trying to figure out why Kirk is so dismissive of Eleyna saying that she had papers to grade, writing it off as “oh, she didn’t know the fire took out the computers”, which has led to cancelled classes. She could have her own battery back-up, like a laptop would in our time and laptops did start coming out when Lorrah was writing this story. Having them in this Trek future could work, since we know tricorders are practically tablets despite a screen about the size of a photo ID picture. Seriously, Jim, I know you’re hot for her but you’re not this dumb. I mean, he’s about to investigate T’Pau, and all we know is that she’s an authority figure in Vulcan society, doesn’t like what she sees as humans disrespecting Vulcan tradition, and inspired the name of an English pop group from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

True story, by the way.

Remember when I said previously that writers setting their story on Vulcan feel a need to address “Amok Time”? Well, that’s what this feels like. There is no reason to bring T’Pau into this investigation, but Lorrah really wants to have Kirk and T’Pau confront each other over those events. That’s what we’ll see next time, so place your bets now as to how good the meeting comes out.