Slaveship (Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars) [Paperback]

First off I'd like to recommend not reading this book immediately after finishing Mandalorian Armor. I tried to do that twice, and was utterly unable to get into it. The author assumes the reader hasn't read the first book, and thus does too much recapping of previous events. Jeter is almost Lumley-esque in this regard. An author should assume that when a reader starts the second book in a trilogy that the reader is intelligent enough to have read the first one.

The most annoying thing about this book is what made the first book so difficult - many of the familiar characters and very misrepresented. Dengar is and emotional, cowardly idiot-wimp, Fett is very talkative, prone to giving `idiot-sheet' speeches, Vader doesn't have enough control over his emotions, etc... However, there is some very good character development in the new characters, which is overshadowed by their mere boringness.

Whereas the assembler Kud'ar Mub'at was interesting in the first book and Kuat unutterably boring, in this book their roles have changed. The arachnoid in this book is predictable, and boring, while Kuat has many interesting thoughts and foresights. Too many in fact. This is another problem with the book. It is hard to read conversations when there are two pages of though between each line of spoken dialogue, for some reason it just doesn't flow that way.

The author also makes the mistake of assuming the readers are inept. He has to have the characters spell out every vestige of every plan, and the dialogue often is overlong and rather speechy. The writer's writing style itself is quite basic, but he covers that up with a lot of adjectives and big thesaurus words. Another filler that he uses is that he repeats physical descriptions and names over and over again, as if afraid that the reader will forget basic stuff from paragraph to paragraph.

Despite all its flaws, however, this is still a pretty good and interesting tale, raising a lot of interesting points, questions and views, while answering other which were opened in the first book. This should be read by fairly serious Star Wars fans, but it's not `necessary' reading.

Besides this, not too much happens in this time frame, except for the plot around Kuat of Kuat and thechallenge by the other bloodlines on the planet to take over his operations. Somehow we find out he planted Falleen pheremomes on Tatooine to make it look like Xizor had Luke's uncle and aunt killed.

Most of the action takes place in the setting just after ANH. Bossk and Boba Fett team up to capture this renegade stormtrooper, not knowing thatPrince Xizor has set a trap for Fett, with help from Palpatine and Kud'ar Mub'at, the spider like alien.

Pretty good action. You can definitely see that everyone involved in this novel is looking out for number one. We get a lot of dialogue from Boba Fett in this one, which is contrary to what most think his character to be, a bounty hunter of few words.

Jeter at times loves to talk, repeating things about certain characters several times during a chapter; like we would forget or something. This tended to string to the book out longer than it should have. At other times, Jeter's writing was great, especially his use of adjectives to describe a planet that Boba Fett and Bossk meet on, where centipede like creatures live, with one wrapping itself around Bossk's ankle.

Overall, this was a fair to good SW book. Looking forward to the finale, Hard Merchandise.