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.
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