I was looking forward to this book the most out of the new canon material because the villains always make for more compelling characters. The premise however, was massively mis-sold to me. Instead of Vader and Palpatine spending quality time together on holiday, they feature very little, and the plot is mostly concerned with a band of twi'lek freedom fighters led by Cham Syndulla and his love interest, ex-slavegirl Isval, along with a traitorous imperial officer named Belkor Dray. The Sith lords are en-route to Ryloth to quell an uprising when their star destroyer is attacked by the insurgents. Crash landing on the planet's surface, master and apprentice must fend of hostile fauna and those who seek to assassinate them whilst waiting for extraction. The idea was strange and different enough from the usual Star Wars fare, but sadly did not live up to expectations.
I noticed that Paul S. Kemp seemed marginally more competent as a writer than the previous batch, but he fails miserably at conveying action scenes. He has a tendency to repeat himself a lot, even using whole sentences and expressions within mere lines of one another. Vader is constantly unleashing a 'blast of power', which is an awful description of Force push. The social justice agenda is also in full sway once again. The traitorous imperial is a young, white male officer who seeks to displace his female superior, who we learn is a lesbian. Moff Mors is a slave trader and a high ranking member of an evil empire, but the fact she is gay instantly offers her plot immunity, dispelling all sense of tension. The fact alone that an openly homosexual woman could rise to such heights within a fascistic regime is a hard sell and further evidence of Disney's transparently misguided agenda.
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