I should disclaim that this was the first Relaunch book I tried to read...and frankly, the Relaunch ultimately did very little for me. Your mileage will definitely vary on this.

I picked up the book for the Cardassia/Bajor plotline, and that was the half of the book that I finished. I generally enjoyed that, and felt Jarman did a good job of depicting the "one step forward, two steps back" aspect of Cardassia and Bajor trying to put such a long and painful past behind them. Gul Macet and Ziyal were very well-used in that regard.

The half set in the Gamma Quadrant I rapidly began skipping over, and the most I can say is "meh". This is in part because I'm not big on Ezri Dax, so any plotline she heavily features in is automatically at a disadvantage for me. But the bigger problem is that I just didn't find anything to connect to. There was the occasional interesting detail, but I was never able to invest in the new races, their dilemma, or the need to resolve it. Likewise, I found very little to invest in with the new characters--and since the GQ half relied strongly on the new characters, that became a major problem. Reading out of order probably didn't help, but there are some books where you can jump in and the author will still find a way to make the cast compelling. This one...not so much.

This Gray Spirit takes over where Twilight left off in every way, including every other chapter switching between DS9 in the Alpha QUadrant and the Defiant in the Gamma Quadrant. Again the story in the Alpha quadrant was better than that in the Gamma Quadrant, strange seeing this is supposed to be "Mission Gamma". The Federation announces that Bajor will be welcomed as joining the federation, the Bajorians are being douches about it and are still mad at Caradassia and Kira must navigate this nonsense without hurting anyone’s feeling, while the love story of Ro and Quark continues.

Commander Vaughn finds a new ally in the Gamma Quadrant only to have them double cross him and reveal a racisms that makes 1960s America look tame. Shar thinks if he can save these racists bastards he can save the entire Andorian people.

Jarman does a much better job than George did on keeping her story focused and readable. Chapter sizes where manageable, and each chapter was almost its own cliff hanger wanting me to read through the unrelated next chapter to get to the conclusion of the one I'm on.

There were a couple of Star Trek Univerise inconsistencies that must be dealt with, such as If Quark had access to a containment field within the bar, how come he never used it when things got crazy on the show like when the Klingons drank too much?

When a character we were just beginning to fall in love with dies at the end the whole future of the DS9 relaunch series will need to take a direct turn. Reminds me how much easier it is to kill off and get new mager characters in a book series than a TV series

All in all a great part of the DS9 relaunch and a desire to keep going after the disappointment of book 1 in the Mission Gamma Series. ( )