Reviews

Adrick: One of my pet peeves lately has been the lameness of book covers. In my opinion, a book’s cover should make you stop and think “Hey, I’d like to read that story”. One picture may not be worth a thousand words, but a good cover image certainly piques my interest enough to invest in those words. If I may be forgiven judging this book by its awesome-yet-mysterious noir-inspired cover, I would want to read this book even if I weren’t a huge Star Wars fan already.

It’s almost a shame that the book itself doesn’t adopt the pulpy tone established by the cover and plot description. There is little private investigating, the reporter is certainly not hard-boiled (although perhaps a tad over-easy at times), and no one’s gaze cuts like a blaster on full through the smoke-filled air of a cantina seedy enough to serve as a repository for the Ministry of Agriculture.

But retro-pulp expectations aside, this is a darn good Expanded Universe book. It’s a novel about some B-list characters in the Star Wars galaxy who find themselves in an entertaining but not galaxy shattering plot—this is refreshing after the lengthy, plodding Legacy of the Force. It also serves as a nice bridge between the prequel EU novels of recent years and the original trilogy era stories like Shadows of the Empire. When future generations of Star Wars fans read the novels in chronological order, they’ll have a much smoother transition from book to book than those of us who had to read each book as it came out.

Many of the characters here are imported from previous novels by Reaves and his sometime writing partner Steve Perry, so reading Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter and the MedStar duology before starting Jedi Twilight would be a good idea. Reaves also makes use of Even Piell, an underutilized Jedi Council member from the films, and Nick Rostu, a supporting character from Matt Stover’s Shatterpoint. Rostu doesn’t quite have the edge I remember from his original appearance, but it’s good to see some of Stover’s plotlines picked up on. Shadow’s Prince Xizor also gets some terrific scenes, including a climactic battle that pits the Prince’s hand-to-hand combat skills against Jax Pavan’s failing Force powers. This doesn’t sit too well with Xizor’s earlier/later experience with Vader’s dark side abilities in the Bounty Hunter Wars, but it’s certainly exciting.

Surprisingly, though, I enjoyed the new characters more than the returning ones. There’s an aide of Vader’s, whose fear of the Sith Lord becomes overwhelming, a Jedi from a splinter sect with unusual Force talents, and a Hutt with a taste for unusual—and potentially deadly--artwork. Jax Pavan’s struggle to find the Force—or to let the Force find him—is also explored in a new and interesting way.

If I have one complaint about this story, it’s that it’s set entirely on Coruscant—a planet that, in my opinion, is being overused. Aside from the multitude of EU works exploring Coruscant, we’ve seen the “rogue Jedi in Coruscant’s underworld trying to help people on Coruscant while hiding from Darth Vader” plotline before in both the Last of the Jedi and Evasive Action series. However, Reaves has done a great job here, and I’m ready for two more volumes of Coruscant Nights.