Manages to hold together a bunch of new, original characters pretty well.

Reunion is an entertaining and fast paced, murder-mystery-detective novel involving the crew of Captain Picard's old ship, the Stargazer, and his current crew on the Enterprise. Friedman manages to capture the personalities of well known and new characters fairly well and write an entertaining story at the same time. We also learn how Jack Crusher actually died.

Rating: 3.5 stars ( )

A murder mystery set on the Enterprise. The background is a reunion of the surviving officers from the Stargazer, Capt. Picard's first command. A good book for filling in some Star Trek history and a decent mystery, though the technology gaps in Star Trek are a bit obvious in this one. ( )

Of course, this is a book I've read many times before, but it's one of Michael Jan Friedman's better ones. The Stargazer crew is an interesting bunch of characters, and meeting them and seeing glimpses of a young Picard are really the best parts of the book. (The best scene in the book-- and indeed, perhaps the best scene Friedman ever wrote-- is Pug Joseph's confession to Wesley.) The B-plot about a subspace anomaly and some random Romulans is pretty forgettable, but the A-plot of the (attempted) murder mystery is executed well, aside from the fact that the crew doesn't actually investigate the attempt, but just sits tight and hopes no one gets murdered. Crusher cracks it in the end thanks to a chance comment in an old letter from Jack, but by that point the murderer's kidnapped Picard, so what's the point? (I wonder how much the impact of this book has been diluted in this modern age, where we've had almost a dozen books detailing the adventures of the 'gazer crew. These small glimpses used to be all we had; now they seem somewhat insignificant. Though I do wish the proper 'gazer series had depicted the mission of exploration described in this book, rather than stopping just before it.)