At the time this book was announced, in September 2004, I barely took notice because the PT-era EU did not interest me. As the release of RotS approached, however, my interest developed and I read James Luceno's movie tie-in Labyrinth of Evil and Matthew Stover's movie novelisation with great appreciation (as per my earlier reviews).

These books (and the movie itself) led me to actually look forward to Dark Lord and I was very happy to discover that its release was brought forward from February 2006 to November 2005. The prospect of learning what had happened to Vader after he emerged in the suit had become quite enticing.

It was with much anticipation that I sat down with this book as soon as it arrived and started reading.

No sign of Vader in the first few pages, just a bunch of Jedi I'd never heard of. In many respects I think it was a good idea to have new Jedi - there were meant to have been so many Jedi in the galaxy before Order 66 that the survival of too many of the few that we knew from beforehand would really be stretching credulity. However, I think that too much time was spent establishing these characters before we got to the title character.

No sign of Vader in the first few chapters - just more of those Jedi. In fact no sign of Vader until page 51, by which time I was really unhappy with the book albeit determined to keep reading.

I am used to James Luceno's books taking a little longer than most to get moving, although neither The Unifying Force nor Labyrinth of Evil suffered from this problem, but I was particularly disappointed with the first half of Dark Lord. Even when we finally see Vader I felt that we had little insight into his feelings or development and we were told almost nothing of what had happened in the weeks between Mustafar and his first appearance in this book.

Around page 150 I was almost ready to give up, but was determined to finish if only to ensure continuity before reading Karen Traviss's two Vader short stories.

I'm glad I continued as the second half of the book was a considerable improvement on the first, giving us a little more of a look at Vader's thinking and developing the new characters to a point where I did actually care what happened to them. The intertwining of this story with the fate of Kashyyyk, as well as cameos given to many of the longer standing movie characters, made for a very interesting conclusion to the book.

All things considered, this book is worth reading and I will probably read it again soon - I suspect that now that I know what to expect I will actually enjoy Dark Lord more the second time around.

However, having now also read Karen Traviss's short stories, In His Image and A Two-Edged Sword, I can't help but wonder if this book would have been better off in her hands.


Links to all of my reviews/overview blogs can be found in this blog.