Okay, so this "wrap-up" book of this quartet feels like bizarre crackfic. A serious spoiler: what we've been leading up to for about 1000 pages is that an important PLANET cracks open and births a GIGANTIC BIRD?!?! Plus more on Kalinda and our sexual subplot that is used as the only mechanism to characterize a Vulcan. Iunno. If I weren't committed to reading this series for other reasons, I doubt I'd be continuing. But I probably wouldn't have picked this series up to begin with, either, in that case, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted entirely.

Peter David's tendency to have his characters interrupt each other in dialogue, use sentence fragments, and trail off with ellipses even in his narration is getting on my nerves a bit. I simultaneously find myself more impressed with his zingers, though; the line-over-line dry humor can be quite laugh-inducing. ( )