KLINGON GAMBIT [Paperback]

While mapping a new planet, the Enterprise receives a top-priority message from Starfleet Command, directing them to a nearby star system, where all life signs aboard the Vulcan science ship T'pau have ceased. The science vessel was ferrying a group of Andorian scientists to the site of an archaeological dig, on a planet where a large pyramid had been found, but no other structures or signs of artifacts. There is also a Klingon dreadnought, a powerful new warship, orbiting the planet. Kirk must investigate the Vulcans' deaths, engage the Klingons without beginning a war, and protect the scientists on the planet. To make matters worse, the crew begins to act oddly; crew members leave their posts, Spock is alternately irrational and coldly logical, McCoy begins to distrust all machines. Fights break out all over the ship, over the smallest provocations. And Scotty scavenges the other ship systems, in attempts to improve the performance of the warp engines. Did the Klingons kill the Vulcans? There is no obvious cause of death. A wrong step will mean a galactic war.

This novel is more of the length of a Bantam series book, about 150 pages. It is difficult to fault Vardeman for his characterizations, because the crew is supposed to be out of character here. Actually, they are supposed to be of heightened character, which doesn't always work. There are elements of the episodes "The Naked Time" and "Shore Leave" here, although this story is not as well handled as those. Vardeman makes one large error when Kirk leaves the conn, not once but twice, to Chekov, when higher-ranking officers, specifically Uhura, remain on the bridge. It is important to his story, but the story could have been changed to a more sensible progression without harming the plotline.

McCoy's back-to-nature kick has been seen before, although it is taken a bit farther here. Other crew members have relatively uninteresting pursuits, and there is little science development. There isn't a lot to recommend this volume, it is merely another book, of interest for series fans but not a strong entry.

Yup, I liked this book. It's interesting that I had first read it back in the mid-1980s, before I had actually seen much Star Trek, and at that time had only thought it was fair, and would have agreed with many of the lackluster reviews that have been posted here.
However, I have recently re-read the book, after (over many years) watching every episode of the original series (and Next Gen, and the animated series), as well as having seen all the movies (some of them countless times), and I now think that this book is fine. Oh, sure, various ideas were obviously derived from certain episodes, but it's still an enjoyable reading experience for those who enjoy Star Trek. I was quite surprised at how much better this book was than I had remembered, and I was laughing and nodding along with some of the Spock dialogues, enjoying the twists and turns involved in Kirk's dealings with the Klingons (who are old-school; not of the type seen in the Next Generation, which would not be seen until 7 years after this book was published), and generally getting into the whole spirit of Star Trek again, after some time spent away from it.
I think that part of the problem with reviewers here is that they are using a rating scale that, in their minds, is attuned to various Star Trek stories, specifically, rather than the overarching scale used by Amazon. They might post a two-star review here, on the thought that this book was not original or stunning enough, compared with so many other movies, books, and episodes... without recognizing that on the Amazon scale, two stars means "I didn't like this product." Did they really "not like" this Star Trek story? Or are they simply saying that, compared with other Star Trek stories, it isn't the best?
My four-star rating, on the Amazon scale, means "I liked this book," and I did. Quite a bit. Although derivative, the situations were interesting and entertaining, and quite a lot of different things did happen throughout the course of the book. I particularly enjoyed the way that Spock's logic was handled and contrasted with Kirk's more instinctive (more creative) approach to the problems the Enterprise faces. That was something I felt to be better handled here (the descriptive form seeming to help by requiring more details and lengthier, more explicit explanations) than it usually was in the original series, where things were simply chalked up to "logic" versus "intuition" in an unsatisfying matter that usually seemed to favor the humans' stumbling success as proof that logic is somehow inferior. In this book, I felt that the situations, perhaps even some of the actual text and dialogues, had the result of presenting a more sophisticated comparison between Kirk and Spock's different approaches to a problem. Some readers probably just felt "Well of course this solution is obvious" if they didn't worry about the dilemma of how to prove that it was correct. In his own way, Kirk here proves that a rational approach (and that of empirical science) is not merely limited to the precision of logical calculation, and thus invokes for the reader the fact that problem-solving often involves innovation and creativity (which are not really the same thing as "intuition"), and that logic still needs a supply of possibilities and data, to process.
This was a fine book, in the way that most Star Trek stories are fine. When the comparison is made in general, rather than just between various Star Trek stories, I think most fans would admit that *all* of the episodes are worth watching and have some things of interest, if only for the character interactions. This book has a lot of content (its shorter page count is offset by its use of a small print size, such that the book could easily have been 200 pages long, if formatted differently), and although it did have a couple of odd editing or typographic problems (a missing line that had been replaced by a duplicate line, a couple of references to things that didn't seem to happen), and a story that might be seen as lacking great momentum (because the problem and solution aren't at first particularly clear), the story does make sense (contrary to what some have claimed) and the characters are very much in line with episodes such as "The Naked Time" in which some uncharacteristic things occur, yet are ultimately explainable in terms of a force that is having a psychological impact. (At least one reviewer here had stated, incorrectly, that some uncharacteristic behaviors occur before exposure to this force. That is not true; the behaviors merely occurred before the crew had recognized the existence and nature of that force, but their potential exposure to it starts nearly at the very first page, as their ship arrives at the planetary location in question.)
This review is based upon a fairly early printing of the book (7th printing?) and the couple of typographic/editing problems I saw may even have been cleared up in later editions.

This is a typical ST novel. Typical, meaning this is well written in the style of a typical ST:TOS episode. It was well thought out and had good characters. The Klingons were portrayed well, as well as most of the secondary supporting characters.