Fun, action-packed story in which pretty much everything is thrown at the wall - a dark Jedi, a genius Admiral, creepy assassin aliens, smugglers and battles and political intrigue and so on. All these strands make the novel very fast-paced, which is good. There are parts of it, however, I think Zahn could have stood to spend more time on - e.g. Leia's genuinely interesting stay on the Wookiee home world - and parts of it that gobbled too much page (wall) space... I am entirely indifferent to Mara Jade and her dull and endless angst, for example. What I did like, particularly, was the whole underlying concept that the Rebellion, having found itself in power after the events of Return of the Jedi, isn't having the easiest time of things. Which is absolutely realistic: the skills which make a successful guerrilla resistance don't always and easily translate into successful governance, and this understanding gives a more realistic if less triumphant take on the whole universe. So there's factions and back-biting and I get the impression from the cliff-hanger ending that this will have a stronger focus in the next volume, which I'm quite looking forward to reading now. This has certainly been a step up from the initial three movie novelisations.