I never found the episode novelizations satisfying, in part because they went afield from the way things were done in the broadcasts. While I understand the thinking behind keeping the Cylons living beings as they were originally conceived, this meant losing some important things later on, particularly with regard to Iblis's voice as Imperious Leader, which is dispensed with completely in the "War Of The Gods" novelization (and more incredibly, the Ship Of Lights returns Baltar to his baseship at the end of the book but then without explanation he's a prisoner again when adapting "Baltar's Escape"). It also didn't help that "Hand Of God" was never adapted since that is the strongest episode of the series overall.
One reason why I went back and did my own fanfic adaptations of all the original series episodes (I have now done 12 of the 17 stories, not in sequence) was because I felt the stories could use expanding/adjusting/foreshadowing but to do it without harming the integrity of what was broadcast so that reading them would be like experiencing an expanded version of the actual episodes. The novelizations, much like Hatch's novels, too often offer the same characters not speaking in familiar voices to me.
That said, "Tombs Of Kobol" is one of the better ones in the series beacuse Robert Thurston was the best of the writers hired for these. He had to come up with a pretty good way of getting Baltar alive again since his novelization of "Saga" has a scene of a centurion telling Imperious Leader that Baltar had been beheaded and the body disposed of.
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