Title Hard Merchandise (BHW)
Author: K.W. Jeter
Pages: 338
Time: 4 ABY

Introduction
By the time I started to read this novel I was pretty much fed up with the bounty hunter wars story. I had hoped the last story would be short, be it appeared to be even larger than the second part. Why? I cannot imagine, the story is far to thin to be spread out across two novels and now it is even being spread into a third one. Needless to say, my initial thoughts about the novel were 'a bit' negative. You can read below, whether they have changed.

Novel quality
While this novel still uses the past/present story structure it now focuses mainly on the present. Somehow the focus has gone from the bounty hunters guild to the situation on Kuat. The first part of the novel is used to tie up the story around Xizor and the Emperor. The story ends rather unsatisfactory as nothing really happens to any of the major characters in the story. Sure the story is ok, but nothing that happens has any real implications for the future. This seems a bit of a shame as you have just read through about 400-500 pages of story and then end up with an ending that doesn't really mean anything to the galaxy.

The second part of the novel focuses on the present situation of Boba Fett who is in the process of delivering Neelah to Kuat. Neelah will play an important role in the story as Kuat Drive Yards is at the breaking points and starts to receive some extra attention from the Rebel Alliance. The Alliance seems to be very interested in Kuat Drive Yards, but Kuat of Kuat does not want to share his company. This is finally some relevant information. We see how the Rebels behave themselves just around the final defeat of the Empire. We also get served some more plotting, this time within Kuat Drive Yards. This is however also totally irrelevant to anything outside of the story and therefore not very interesting at all. The ending of the story is ok, we get closure for all of the main characters and Mr. Jeter closes things in a satisfying manner.

All in all you'll have to read through more than a thousand (!) pages to read a mildly interesting story with no real implications to anything outside of the story. I'll restate my opinion: "This story should have been written in one novel of around 450 pages!" By spreading it out over three novels and 1000+ pages the story is basically ruined. Don't get me wrong, there are things to like about the story, but it is all just too much work to read, to make it worth your while. My advice: Only read this if you want to read every single novel out there. If you don't, just leave it alone, nothing you have to know happens in these novels.
Rating: 65/100

Personal tilt
It's really a shame that the story has been spread out across so many pages. If the story would have been more compact, it wouldn't really have mattered that nothing extremely interesting happened. You would just have enjoyed the great interaction between Xizor, Vader and Sidious and you would have gotten some nice insight into Boba Fett's character. Now it's all just too much. It gets boring and you'll read about a whole bunch of totally uninteresting characters. Let's just say that I am really happy that I finally finished it and that I can now go on to the X-Wing series.
Rating: 45/100

Overall rating: 57.0/100

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See my Book review summary for other reviews and a my personal top ten.