In the book of Revelation, we finally discover what’s been going on with God’s plan for Creation, plus there’s a lot of drama involving trumpets and earthquakes and some prostitute from Babylon 5. I don’t want to give away the ultimate climax, but, spoiler alert, Jesus is finally back, after we’ve all been waiting for what seems like millennia at this point. What I can’t figure out is how, if this is the penultimate novel of the Legacy of the Force series, they’ll have anything remaining for the last one.

Oh. Um. This is embarrassing. It turns out that the book I read is also called Revelation, but just that title by itself. Oops! So, right, completely different plot, but it fits much better as a next-to-last book, so on the whole I have to approve. (Sadly, no Jesus.) We’ve come back around to another entry focussed on Boba Fett, except this time it finally ties into the overall plot of the series, leading me to care a lot more. Plus, Mandalorian society and Fett’s personality are both a fair bit more interesting than they were in the previous such volumes, making this easily the best of Traviss’ three entries to the series. In addition to the superior character- and society-building being done, the plot that has to do with the new Sith Lord’s ascendancy that we’ve been examining over the past eight books now is also returning to the quality form of the first couple of books in the series.

Unfortunately, I’ve reached the point where anything I could say that holds meaning will be a serious spoiler for the first half of said series. I doubt this will really bother anyone, but on the off chance, look below the cut.

So, it’s like this. While the rest of the Jedi are dithering over the obviously unacceptable acts that Jacen Solo has continued to perpetrate over the couple of books since he secretly killed Luke’s wife Mara, his twin sister Jaina has finally stepped up to take him down. Unfortunately his superior Force mastery, not to mention the new Sith powers (but no lightning bolts? Grow a pair already, Caedus!), would result in a reasonably unfair fight. So Jaina opts for a different tack and goes to Boba Fett for the bounty hunter’s unique perspective on hunting and killing Jedi. Meanwhile, Darth Caedus sets the stage for a pivotal battle that will either leave him with as much control over the Galactic Alliance as Palpatine had over the Old Republic just before the Jedi were executed en masse or will leave his army shattered and his hopes for an orderly albeit Naziesque galaxy forever destroyed. And Ben Skywalker comes ever closer to final proof as to the identity of his mother’s murderer and to forcing the Jedi to finally take responsibility for what they have allowed to occur over the past year. Also, I guess Luke and Han and Leia are there?

A lot of that sounds melodramatic at best, in part for playing out so slowly at a place in the series where a tipping point should have already been reached and events set careening toward their inevitable conclusion. And some people will say that has been the problem with the series as a whole, but I thought the stately pace was very well suited to the first half of the series, right ’til when Jacen killed Mara. After that, the time passing during which the mystery was solved and the war raged on toward a full power-consolidation should have spanned a single book instead of the previous three. So this book is well-served both by finally reaching that conclusion as well as by the fantastic character interplay between Jaina Solo, Boba Fett, and his granddaughter Mirta. And it heralds the return of one of the characters that made up for so much of the mediocre-to-lame mish-mash of Extended Universe novels that came out in the 90s before whoever it was came along and saved the franchise by forcing all of the authors into strictly linear and collaborative story-telling with the start of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion and the New Jedi Order series. So, hooray for that person and for the returning cool character, who I expect to be more relevant to a future series than to the conclusion of this one.

Speaking of which, I have mixed feelings about the upcoming final book. It might be very good indeed; both the premise and the author have shown that potential. But unless it is extremely good, it will have retroactively made the entire series lame instead of just a couple of books in the second half, and that’s a lot of expectational weight to bear. It remains to be seen!