Review: Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements (Star Trek: Picard #3), by John Jackson Miller, 2021

Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements (Star Trek: Picard #3), by John Jackson Miller, 2021

Synopsis:

Starfleet was everything for Cristóbal Rios—until one horrible, inexplicable day when it all went wrong. Aimless and adrift, he grasps at a chance for a future as an independent freighter captain in an area betrayed by the Federation, the border region with the former Romulan Empire. His greatest desire: to be left alone.

But solitude isn’t in the cards for the captain of La Sirena, who falls into debt to a roving gang of hoodlums from a planet whose society is based on Prohibition-era Earth. Teamed against his will with Ledger, his conniving overseer, Rios begins an odyssey that brings him into conflict with outlaws and fortune seekers, with power brokers and relic hunters across the stars.

Exotic loves and locales await—as well as dangers galore—and Rios learns the hard way that good crewmembers are hard to find, even when you can create your own. And while his meeting with Jean-Luc Picard is years away, Rios finds himself drawing on the Starfleet legend’s experiences when he discovers a mystery that began on one of the galaxy’s most important days…

 

Review:

What a dump-truck-on-fire of a novel this was. I tried hard to like the book, and I even almost abandoned it several times, but I had to plow through it because I wanted to get to know more of Rios' backstory and how he came to be the captain of his starship of La Sirena. Considering these novels in the Picard book trilogy are to be regarded as canon, I had a certain level of expectation. But this author did the character Rios and the Star Trek franchise some grave disservice. 

The author reduced Rios into a wise bumbling fool who can't catch a break and is always a victim of circumstance. Such a shame and waste of opportunity to bring Rios to life with a rich backstory. Instead, we get the one-trick pony slapstick humor repeatedly throughout the book, minor characters with no dimensions who we will probably never hear of again, and the Iotians.

I rate this book 1.5 star out of 5.

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