With a new Stephen King book on the way, my goal was to pick a book that would be fast and easy, so I could be done in time to start right in. But, between suddenly picking up a lot of steam on the last of my 360 games and picking a book that wasn’t quite as breezy as I was expecting, I ran a few days late. Luckily, it was for a book that I genuinely enjoyed, so that’s okay.

Apparently, Timothy Zahn’s latest Star Wars entrant was released a couple of years ago while I was paying attention to something else. I never really saw it anywhere, or heard people talking about it until just in the past month. This is odd, because it appears to have been pretty relevant to all the other ones I’ve been reading lately, and even more so because it was at the usual high watermark in literary quality of the ongoing series. (Luckily for me, the prequel to Survivor’s Quest will be out next week, and I know to watch for it this time.)

In any case, yeah, this one has all the Star Wars-y (and otherwise) goodness you might be looking for. Onion layer-worthy twists, lightsaber excitement galore, a stormtrooper squad that I’ve lately been familiar with from the world of videogames (which makes it cooler to me, if not to Joe Average Reader, I suppose), the past and the future of the franchise coming together in an entirely sensible and interesting way. Sure, some of the books are golden, some of them you read just to know what’s going on between gold, and some of them you can ditch because the other books will pick up the slack for you in apology for this last group of books being so horrible. As usual, though, Zahn only provides the pure gold. Could you read just his stuff, ignore that the rest of the Star-Wars-as-a-novel experiment exists, and be pretty happy with the outcome? There’s a lot of other things I’ve read and enjoyed the hell out of, but yes. Yes, you could.