It took me a little while to finish this book, not sure why really, but I read the final pages yesterday and am ready to go with my thoughts. Before I start that though I was debating if I wanted to go back & talk about some of the other books I read between this & Dark Rendezvous. I read 4 more of the Jedi Apprentice books (5-8) and the first 2 of the Han Solo Trilogy (Paradise Snare & Hutt Gambit). I figure I'll do the entire Jedi Apprentice collection as one big review...I just need to get the last 10 or so books first :P Then I'll do the Solo Trilogy after I get caught up to the final installment.


Anyways, on to Cloak of Deception:


My initial reading of the reviews made me a bit hesitant to read this book seeing as how I'm not a huge fan of 'political dramas'. I should've known though that reviews aren't always to be trusted, hence the reason I never read movie reviews prior to watching any film - I have a much different taste in movies than the majority of mainstream movie critics. Back to the book - The beginning of the story had me a bit confused with the sudden introduction of the Nebula Front...but as the story drew on it made more sense to me. Even though it did become clearer in my mind the final thoughts on the need for the Nebula Front seemed like a bit of a stretch. The idea of another faction being upset with the Trade Federation and working in the Outer Rim is plausible but I believe by the end of the book there was a bit too much twisting & turning within that group...it almost seemed like a rush job to create a 3rd party within the main Palpatine plan to overthrow the Senate.

Being not that impressed with the Nebula Front addition, I will say that I did find the minute details given to the Palpatine scheme to take over to be quite impressive. I liked finding out how he did first contact the Trade Federation and how he got them to do his bidding. Using the Neimodians weakness, desire for more money and overall 'weak backbone', it seemed almost too easy for Palpatine to get what he wanted though I'm sure some Dark Side persuasion/pressure was levied down as well. One other nice addition was the meetings between Palpatine & Valorum. Those exchanges showed perfectly how two-sided Palpatine was and how being to trusting lead to Valorum's overall downfall, though even had he known I doubt there was anything he could've done to stop Palpatine from accomplishing his overall goal.

Another issue I had was while reading, and I don't have the book next to me now to verify this, was during the Jedi fight I'm pretty sure I read that Ki-Adi Mundi was sporting a purple lightsaber. I thought that Mace Windu was the only one to have purple (now my EU knowledge might be suffering here but I'm sure that will be corrected by someone who knows ) so that part of keeping with the continuity kinda bothered me, though it isn't a huge deal it jumped out to me like a flashing billboard.

For being a decent sized book, I found when I finished that I didn't really have a whole lot to say about the book. I did overall enjoy reading it for adding depth to a storyline, but I don't think it really added a whole lot to the overall Star Wars storyline besides showing how Palpatine started things moving along in his quest for power...and that to me isn't really all that exciting of a storyline, at least from this angle. With that being said, I don't regret spending time reading the book but I don't think it is one that I would pick up again in the near future for another pass through.

Next up on my list (and actually almost finished with) is Hard Contact...oh how I'm enjoying reading that book