“The Badlands, Part I” by Susan Wright
Finished “The Badlands, Part I” by Susan Wright
That is to say I've finished the first half of a novel in which the second half is Next Gen. I intend to finish it, later, when I get to Next Gen. Which probably means that I'm going to have to re-read part 1 when I get there to remind myself what happened.
Kirk is ordered to a point outside of claimed space to intercept a smuggler who Starfleet believes is carrying information about the Romulan plasma weapon that they'd first encountered in “Balance of Terror” way back in early Season 1. They find the titular Badlands, which Starfleet is apparently largely unaware of. They capture who they believe to be the smuggler, and bring them aboard, and have an entanglement with a Romulan Bird of Prey. There's a radiation burst, which destroys the Romulan ship, and the Enterprise crew is hit with dangerous and mysterious form of gamma radiation. A bunch of the crew get sick with radiation poisoning.
The Klingons show up, and they play cat and mouse with them for a while, while Kirk tries to get information about the plasma weapon out of their captured smuggler.
I'm going to reserve comment on it, since it's only the first half of the first novel of a 2 novel series. When I get to Part 2, I might have more to say. But it's a pretty reasonable start so far.