Weirdest Trek novel

[Christopher]

IIRC, they couldn’t see red because they were one color shift over from the color spectrum, which meant that while they couldn’t see red, they could see ultraviolet.

Not exactly. It's that the human eye has three color pigments whose peak sensitivities are red, green, and blue respectively (which is why those are the primary colors), and the Klingons only had the green and blue pigments and had a different, UV-sensitive one in place of the red one.

As far as the topic is concerned, the one thing that always annoyed me was when an established science fiction novelist was given the opportunity to write a Trek novel, and they inevitably created a story where the cast acts completely out of character in order to serve the plot that has nothing to do with Star Trek, but rather whatever trope that writer is known for. It’s almost as if they never actually saw the show and were just given character bios to work with in an effort to just ‘write what they know’ instead of an actual Star Trek story. Jeter’s Warped and Zebrowski & Pellegrino’s Dyson Sphere immediately come to mind.

I found the scientific essay at the end of Dyson Sphere more intriguing than the novel itself.