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'It's worse than that he's still alive...Jim'

Captain Kirk is alive and well and churning out books. Apparently a bit miffed at being killed off in 'Star Trek: Generations', Mr Shatner has co-written, with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, three books already about the reincarnated Captain.

In this new book, 'The Captain' takes the other Captain, Jean Luc Picard, to Bajor for a vacation. Kirk's idea of a vacation involves orbital skydiving through Bajor's atmosphere. This is very nearly fatal as he unfortunately bought the suits from Quark on Deep Space Nine.

Alone with Picard in the Bajorian desert, Kirk starts to reminisce about an incident in the early months of his command of the Enterprise when Spock has decided to ask for a transfer. Getting to their intended destination they find that there has been a murder and as the sole representatives of Starfleet are determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

So a little bit of action wrapped up with Agatha Christie's 'Death on the Nile' then. Kirk is still very much the action hero albeit with a few more aches and pains. Shatner is happy to acknowledge the passage of time even if he is not ready to relinquish the reins of command.

The authors having no need to establish the characters of its main leads because they are now so familiar to us should perhaps concentrate on making the plots more substantial. Both of the main characters behave rather predictably.

Kirk preferring to get on and do whereas Picard is more ruminative. The plot is not substantial with some fairly predictable twists and turns. The sub-plot is disappointing taking a long time to get to the point.

Once again, we are back in ghost territory where the story uses the publicity surrounding 'Star Trek' to 'piggy-back' onto the bookshelves. So many books are produced with the TV tag-line that is hard to pick out a truly worthwhile effort. This novel really does not add anything to the sum total of 'Star Trek' knowledge.

If you've read old Shatner's previous efforts and you are happy with it then by all means buy it but there are books out there more worthy of your hard-earned cash.

You may even be able to find them in your local bookshop. However the chances are, if current trends continue, that there will be more and more laziness with regard to stocking the shelves.

If our local WH Smith is anything to go by, all you will find this Christmas is TV series novelisations, Terry Pratchett and fantasy novels in varying quality. Well that's OK, I like TP and he is rather a one-man production line - but what happened to variety?

Sue Davies