With Bajor’s natural resources running out and the Bajoran resistance growing, there is disquiet amongst many factions of the Cardassian Union. The resistance has to contend with a new defence grid, which effectively can target both ships and personnel. But change is coming, Ferengis move onto the station and Odo realises that the position of outsider may well be untenable and he may have to choose sides...

Star Trek: Terok Nor: Dawn of the Eagles is the concluding book in S. D. Perry and Brutta Dennison’s Deep Space Nine trilogy. The book is set between 2360 and 2369 in the last days of the Cardassian occupation, though does not cover the Federation's arrival. The story follows on from James Swallow's Day of the Vipers and Perry and Dennison’s own Night of the Wolves. Unfortunately, although I enjoyed Swallow's opening salvo in this trilogy I was less than impressed with the second novel and, I’m afraid to say, many of the faults with Wolves remains evident in Eagles.

Where you would expect an explosion of resistance action you get a fairly unfocussed examination of the minutiae of each of the characters lives. In part, this remains the basic problem with the last two books. Perry and Dennison have introduced too many characters, which means that they have to jump back and forth to keep them all in sequence creating a disconcertingly uneven reading experience. The character list grows ever larger for the last book as the authors have to move Odo, Quark, Nog and Rom onto the station and have to deal with all the known events depicted in Deep Space Nine. They seem to have included just about every Bajoran that would appear in the show.

On the plus side, the style of writing is very heavily descriptive, which allows the authors to really expand some of the characters, although as many of the characters would appear in the television show Perry and Dennison do not have the leeway to develop these. The book does this best with its Cardassian characters, except for Dukat, who I still feel is a little two-dimensional. Another criticism is the inclusion of the Starfleet personnel, which are all the old faces, from the books and shows, conveniently working in the smallest fleet in the galaxy.

What is handled well, apart from the Cardassians, is Odo’s moral development, though I did feel that the device to get him onto the station was a bit artificial. I certainly do not envy the authors task given the word length of the books. With so many events and so many characters this was never going to be more than a thumbnail sketch of the annexation of Bajor.

5

Charles Packer