A review by octavia_cade
Line of Fire by Peter David

2.0

The second volume in this trilogy sees the cadets of Worf's First Adventure on an arbitration mission to a human/Klingon colony world where everything has gone pear-shaped. On the bright side, the story continues to zip along and on the very bright side, Worf meets K'Ehleyr for the first time and I always enjoyed the pair of them, so points for that. It's a shame, however, that the plot relies on adults being idiots. The colony is struggling, mostly with race relations, and the best solution Starfleet can come up with is to send first year cadets to arbitrate (admittedly under the supervision of an experienced officer) - as if a high-tension population that values its independence is going to appreciate being told what to do by a bunch of kids. But of course it all works out, because the adults are brain-dead until teenagers are there to fix their lives for them - the engineering student, Tania, solves the ongoing power problems by realising that some power couplings are defective, for example. Which, great, but this seems like basic stuff the colony's scientists could have checked for themselves, had they had the two brain cells necessary to run a simple diagnostic...