“This book suffers from many of the problems of Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (who coincidentally is a very prevalent writer of Star Wars novels). What I'm referring to is that horrible misuse of a book to sell books that came before it.
In many ways, this felt almost like a duology with book one being Outbound Flight and this being its distant sequel set 50 years after the original. It still features a number of the same characters and in order to get the full benefit of the story, it really helps if you've read the book prior. For even greater enhancement, you should have read both books in the Hand of Thrawn duology. Did I mention Timothy Zahn wrote all three of those books?
This is probably the one Zahn book I like the least, but I will still admit that had I not read the prior books, I'd still enjoy the story. It certainly had the elements of a sort of mystery novel which did progress at a reasonable pace. The characters were mostly necessarily and a benefit to the story although some of them didn't quite make sense in the context of how they were before in Outbound Flight.
It's still worth reading but I'm not sure how much you'll respect Timothy Zahn after this. At least it brought back the 501st as an interesting military unit.”
rOckY wrote this review Wednesday, September 3 2008.
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