Crossovers rarely work. Period.That is one of the constants with working with a spinn-off series consept.
Star Trek: Klingon is a novelization of the CD-ROM with the same title, wich, I should note, I've never played. In the novelization Gowron tells the story of the CD-ROM at Quark's bar. He happens to be on DS9 because a Federation-Klingon peace negotiation just happens to take place there, and it also just happens that the crew of the Enterprise-D are present.
The novel doesn't offer any insight to the characters. Old or-Universe forbit-new. And- most dissapointingly- we learn absolutely nothing new about Klingons.
In fact the story could as easily have been told without involving DS9 as the setting of the storytelling sessions or the Enterprise crew as additional and useles characters, and those aspects of the novel seem to hold no purpose whatsoever. So in the end it became apparent that they were only includet to show DS9 and TNG cast work together, wich they really don't even do.
I have nothing against crossovers between the series. On the contrary. But there must be some logical reason to unite the different series. Star Trek: Klingon doesn't offer any.
For example; one of the few things the makers of Voyager did right was to show what happened in the alpha Quadrant conserning Voyager after they found out about it being whole and relatively well in the Delta Quadrant.
They needet a boost in ratings, and they managet to make a succesfullm crossover, because the characters involved with Voyager on Earth were Lt. Reginald Barclay, and through him, Commander Troi. It wasn't forced crossover. It was continuity.
I admit that as far as the stories went, the characters needen't have been our familiar TNG friends, but it was much less obvious than that horribly written appearence of Scotty in- analytically- one of the worst episodes of TNG: "Relics", the best example of desparately pathetic attemts of continuity and grounding a weak story completely in the appearance of a familiar face.
Star Trek: Klingon was even worse. There wasn't even a forced reason to unite the crews. Backed with an entertaining, but short and aimless story containing no real insight on the Klingon mind and culture, missing characterization, and endless clichés, we get a Star Trek books that hasn't got anything to do with the potential in creating a Klingon based story.
There are really two stories here, artfully interwoven: the story of young Pok's coming of age, an interesting look into Klingon culture, as told by Gowron while he is taking part in Klingon-Federation negotiations on Deep Space Nine, and the story of those negotiations themselves, and the attempts to sabotage them and assassinate Gowron.The stories are interesting, the characters artfully handled, and the writing good (with the exception of a couple of what I'm willing to assume, given the quality of the rest of the writing, to be typographical and copy-editing errors rather than flaws on the part of the writing itself).
This book is not identified on its cover with a specific generation of Star Trek; this usually indicates that it is set in the original series. Don't be fooled; it is something of a hybrid between Next Generation and DS9, which is why it is not identified as either. There is nothing of the original series in it.
