So, I've been trawling through old Star Trek novels from the 90s and early 00s (when they were A Big Thing, with over 20 novels published every year) because I can. Most of them are fun romps through space, usually not that different from the television episodes. But my recent reading has been The Eugenics Wars duology, which is an entirely different and far more ambitious project.
In the original Star Trek canon, as per the events in the TOS episode Space Seed, The Eugenics Wars were a conflict fought in the 1990s between genetically enhanced superpeople and regular humans. In the more recent Trek series, the creators have chickened out and retconned them to take place much later, but in these books, originally from 2001 and 2002, the canon was that they happened in 1992-96. In the books, Greg Cox attempts to explain how the conflict(s) happened, when in the real world they obviously didn't.
Frankly, part 1 was a bit tedious in this, Cox plays with real-world events and explains how the villain Khan, and the book's heroes Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln (from the TOS episode Assignment: Earth, a backdoor pilot for a TV series about the two named heroes as agents of unknown aliens in the 1960s tasked with trying to gently steer humanity towards a better future), were actually present and instrumental in the world turning out the way it did (with loads of easter egg references to various Trek episodes and movies). I have only made a start on part 2 so I cannot comment it too much, but... overall, the biggest problem is that Cox is a science fiction writer, not a writer of historical novels.
If you write a Star Trek novel, you can throw in whatever fact about the Klingons or Ferengi that you want, as long as it isn't directly against extablished canon. But in a book where your heroes travel to real-world places like East Germany, Rome, India or the Soviet Union (and you're specifically claiming this is not an alternate timeline, but our world as it is) you have to get the details right. Cox keeps getting basic details about the places his story visits wrong. Which would be okay if it was his American hero characters that voiced the wrong details, because most (though not all) of the mistakes are ones that would pass if a foreigner made them. But he keeps putting the wrong information in the thoughts of temporary point of view characters from the places under discussion.
An East German border guard would know that the Trabant was not "a state-built car," and would not desribe the late-80s version of the Berlin Wall in the early 1970s. A KGB chief would know that Lenin was not the bolševik leader's real name. Mikhail Gorbachev would surely have realised his supposedly ethnic Russian female translator was a spy if she had a male family name (the name thing happens more than once). And of course, these are only the mistakes I did pick up, because I happen to know a bit about East Germany and the Soviet Union. I shudder to think about the mistakes in the bits set in India, which I don't know enough about to spot them.
Was there a point to this? Not really. I just needed to vent a bit.
"Bosnian city of Dubrovnik." Did you even look at a map? Did no-one proofread this book?