Desperate Hours
Desperate Hours is a Gallery DIS novel – the first novel in the series – written by David Mack. Published by Gallery Books, it was first released in trade paperback in , in conjunction with the first season of .

Summary 
From the book jacket
Aboard the Starship Shenzhou, Lieutenant Michael Burnham, a human woman raised and educated among Vulcans, is promoted to acting first officer. But if she wants to keep the job, she must prove to Captain Philippa Georgiou that she deserves to have it.

She gets her chance when the Shenzhou must protect a Federation colony that is under attack by an ancient alien vessel that has surfaced from the deepest fathoms of the planet's dark, uncharted sea.

As the menace from this mysterious vessel grows stronger, Starfleet declares the colony expendable in the name of halting the threat. To save thousands of innocent lives, Burnham must infiltrate the alien ship. But to do so she needs to face the truth of her troubled past, and seek the aid of a man she has tried to avoid her entire life – until now.

Background information 
 The novel was released in trade paperback, eBook, and audiobook formats.
 The novel's cover and synopsis were revealed at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention on . 
 The novel takes place exactly a year prior to Discoverys first episode, ,  on May 11-12, 2255. 
 Bryan Fuller requested that this novel consist of a crossover between the crews of the Shenzhou and Captain Pike's . Mack "addressed the difference in the ships' aesthetics to a human tendency to want to redesign even the simplest things every few years." The differences in technology were also explained: "I posited that the use of subspace holograms had fallen out of favor by the time the Enterprise was built because the holograms were bandwidth hogs on subspace channels and prone to encryption flaws. And while the interfaces on the Shenzhous bridge look fancier, the characters who serve on the Enterprise feel proud that their ship is so advanced that it doesn’t need all these gadgets to get the job done." Regarding uniforms, "the crews of the Enterprise and other Constitution-class ships are considered elite units, so they’ve been issued special "diplomatic" uniforms to designate their status." 
 Burnham's backstory regarding the fact that it was her request that forced her parents to stay on Doctari Alpha due to a desire to see a nearby star go supernova was a tidbit first revealed in the novel before subsequently being mentioned in canon in .  
 The novel is the first to mention that Saru was rescued from his world by Starfleet officers. This was later confirmed in canon in the . 
 This novel is the first to name Saru's home planet, here called Kelpia. The Discovery novel Fear Itself later used Kaminar, which would first be used on screen in The Brightest Star.
 Pike's encounter with Georgiou in this book is later contradicted in , in which Pike states that they went to Starfleet Academy together. The tie-in novel The Enterprise War, released two years later, attempted to bridge this discrepancy. 
 Pike's first officer, Una is referred to by the name "Una", a name that was first used for her character in the novel Captain to Captain. This was later made canon in  and was confirmed by Michelle Paradise in a subsequent interview.  and officially seen on screen in the  episode.

Cover gallery

Characters

 Saru
 Michael Burnham
 Philippa Georgiou
 Spock

External link 

Novels
Scribe Award nominees
Audiobooks