A Time to Sow (Book III)
A Time To Harvest (Book IV)
Star Trek: Next Generation Series
By Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

    In the first pair of books (A Time to be Born & A Time to Die by John Vornholt; also reviewed on this site) Picard and his crew had saved the day after their encounter with the Ontailians. But this is not enough for Starfleet, and there are murmurings in the corridors of power that he is past his peak. The crew of the Enterprise is given a simple mission to keep them out of trouble. A race called the Dokaalan sent out a distress call two centuries ago, and it was only intercepted several years too late to be of use to them—in the time of Captain Archer. Now Picard has to go forth and see what is left. What they find is a colony of Dokaalans in distress, but quite what the distress is will tax Picard and his crew to the utmost.

    Picard is in trouble again; this nine-book series shows how he and his crew set off on paths away from the Enterprise prior to the film Star Trek: Nemesis. This tale of aliens, benign and hostile, old adversaries and first encounters, saboteurs and terraforming makes for absorbing reading, but it suffers from being too long and repetitive. It could have easily fitted into one slightly larger volume and been all the better for a tauter, faster paced plot. This is more event-based than character-led and gives the crew a chance (well some of them) for a bit of derring-do. On the plus side, I was certainly kept guessing as to who or what was behind it all and how Picard was going to dig himself out of the hole he had dug himself into. A bit of editing would have made this even better.