Book Review: Ring of Fire by David Mack

Ring of Fire by David Mack
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A research station situated close to a star that is slowly losing mass to a black hole is getting sabotaged and the closest Federation starship is the Enterprise. Ring of Fire by David Mack is the fourth book featuring the characters from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a novelization surrounding one of the latest Star Trek series.

Taking place between the third season episodes “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What is Starfleet?”, the book follows the crew going to investigate sabotage and then murder on a suspicious Daystrom Institute research station whose research is “classified” by Starfleet. There are a lot of cliché elements introduced early on that the reader can easily figure out about how the overall narrative was going to progress; however, Mack’s writing made the “predictable” worth reading. As a fan of the show, I thought Mack wrote the characters well and nothing seemed strange. A highlight of the book was giving Erica Ortegas a prominent role as acting XO, which given that the show took nearly three seasons before giving her a dedicated episode is somewhat telling with the showrunners. There were some things that were annoying with the first being that unfortunately for Mack this was the second novel adaptation in a row that dealt with a temporal issue of some kind, the second was that Mack continually used the character’s last names which was very unlike the show for a lot of them. It was a good read, however it didn’t really “pop” for me.

Ring of Fire by David Mack is a good read and fits into the chronology of the third season when it’s set, though there were a few things that didn’t click for me.

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