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House of Cards is the first installment of the Star Trek: New Frontier series of novels, perhaps one of the first series in Trek's EU to add a new ship, and a mostly new crew (though a few characters return from previous works). The book is an interesting start, but it doesn't particularly get very far.
The book is, basically, the first half of a two-hour pilot. We get some back story on the Thallonian Empire, where the book is going to take place, as well as some establishment of some of our main characters (Mackenzie Calhoun, Soleta, Dr. Selar, Si Cwan), as well as some back story and exposition of the current state of the Empire... and that's about it. The book never gets underway. Now, what it does do, it does very well. It does set up some of the main characters, and the connections some of them have with the Empire - but it needs more. In a TV series, or graphic novel, or a serialized novel in a magazine, stopping the story short like this is a little more acceptable, as you've got a page or time limit to work with, and you know that you're getting the next part in a week or month, depending on the medium. Whereas in a novel form like this, the stopping point is sudden and abrupt, and when you're dealing with a novel where you have no idea when the next installment is coming out (theoretically), stopping it this short is almost inexcusable.
All that said, I did enjoy what I read, and I am going to read the next book, because I want to get more of the story - particularly since the comic's on my pull list and I want to figure out what I missed. However, I can't recommend buying only the first book. The first 2-4 books (or, for that matter, the omnibus of the first 4 books in the series) I can recommend, but not the first book on it's own - there just isn't quite enough there to make you satisfied.
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