By Dayton Ward

Simon & Schuster, out now

If you’re the person responsible for the massacre of four thousand civilians, the last man you want on your trail is Gabriel Lorca…

The massacre on Tarsus IV is one of the key parts of Jim Kirk’s backstory, as revealed in the classic Star Trek episode The Conscience of the King, in which an old friend of Kirk’s believes that a travelling actor is in fact the disguised instigator of the murders. In the same way that David Mack’s previous Discovery novel tied Michael Burnham firmly into the established Prime universe with a joint mission with the crew of the USS Enterprise (which I really hope, by the way, isn’t totally overwritten by events next season), so Dayton Ward uses this to flesh out the relationship between Philippa Georgiou and Gabriel Lorca – something we didn’t see on screen, at least with their Prime counterparts.

This isn’t the first time that the licensed fiction has tackled this story, but Ward makes it firmly his own, dumping the reader into the tale as things are reaching their head on the beleaguered planet. We know that Kodos escapes and that no one seems to know what he looks like (something that makes a great hook for a TV episode, but which requires a great deal of jumping through hoops to make work in ‘reality’) and that a few youngsters witnessed the event (one of whom doesn’t make an appearance in this book) but little more. The scene depicting the massacre itself is chilling – the banality of evil at its worst – and Ward shows the effects on the survivors, some of whom missed their appointment with death by sheer luck.

The two Discovery characters are given plenty to do, and Ward treads a fine line of keeping Lorca recognisable from Jason Isaacs’ performance in the TV show yet tacitly acknowledging that this is a different man – some fundamentals remain the same, no matter the universe.

Verdict: The idea of keeping the Discovery tie-in fiction to fleshing out the backstories of the characters pays off again with an excellent piece of Star Trek fiction. 9/10

Paul Simpson