The new characters are young and in Starfleet Academy, but The Delta Anomaly doesn’t get resolved

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: The Delta Anomaly by Rick Barba
Simon Spotlight, $7.99, 224pp, tp, 9781442412415. YA science fiction/tie-in.
Warning: this review contains some plot spoilers.
On the heals of last year’s blockbuster franchise reboot Star Trek comes a new series of tie-in novels. This one focuses on the our heroes in the early years: their days in Starfleet Academy. And echoing the younger mien of the characters is the younger audience: these are YA novels.
In the first, The Delta Anomaly, something mysterious is happening in San Francisco (the evocation of a future San Francisco, still recognizably ours, but with the Academy added in, is nice). It resembles a swarm of insects, or perhaps flashes of light in the sky, and echoes the modus operandi of a serial killer from two decades ago.
The author manages to get Kirk and Company involved in what should be a civilian police matter in not too convoluted a manner, and then Kirk and Uhura get to excel; he as a rampaging action hero, she as the brains of the outfit. And it’s only a little far-fetched that first-year cadet Uhura is the expert Starfleet offers to help solve the mystery.
These are quite obviously the characters we met in last summer’s movie, not the original Star Trek characters. Toward that end, I find them a lot less likable, but they are, in turn, fun. Spock is staid and stoic; McCoy is dyspeptic and grumpy; Kirk is brash, obnoxious, and lucky; and Uhura is brilliant and enigmatic. They have an interesting romp through the foggy streets of San Francisco, and make inroads toward solving the mystery.
Sadly, inroads is all we get. There is no satisfying resolution. The alien life form or creature or probe or whatever that’s wandering around copying and killing people is only sort of recognized, and then it goes away. Long-time Star Trek fans will wonder if this is one of the early incarnations of the Borg (the alien whatever is most probably from the Delta Quadrant), but they’ll also wonder why they bothered reading all the way to the end. Like the worst of Next Generation episodes, the book takes too much time figuring out what the problem is, and too little time solving it, and in this case, they don’t really solve it at all.
Having finished the book, I expected it would be the first of an ongoing story line. But having just received the next volume in the series, which has an entirely new story, I’m disappointed with this one.