In the heart of the Galactic Alliance the Jedi are planning their most audacious move, the removal of the head of state. On the outer fringes of the galaxy, ex grand Master Luke Skywalker, his son and their Sith companion are still hunting the embodiment of evil that is Albeloth...

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi - Conviction is the seventh book in the series, and is written by Aaron Allston.

I don’t really know if fans of the films thought that what started as a series of standalone, generic adventures would one day blossom into a full scale series of political thrillers, heady stuff for a genre book.

It might sound trite, but given that this is the seventh in the series; this is not a good place to start. The plot has, at this point, become so dense with plots and alliances, that without having read any of the previous novels, this is going to be heavy going. It would be fair to say that its reliance on previous knowledge is such that the book only just works as a novel, in its own right.

That is not to give the impression that the book is not well written. To keep so many plates spinning at the same time and still have your audience come away having been able to follow all the threads is an impressive achievement. Allston has been able to inject a sense of the epic back into the Star Wars universe.

Although this is the seventh, it is by no means the last in the series. So, as you can imagine, only a few things are resolved by the close of this chapter and even those could be overturned in the next book. For all his plans Luke, once again, fails to trap or kill Albeloth, though that has never really been the intention as the malevolent dark force alien it’s the writer's excuse to have Luke travel the cosmos, which opens new narrative possibilities.

The Galactic Alliance Senate is another thing, with labyrinthine plots which would have put the Romans to shame. Power and influence ebbs and flows and only the completion of the series will really tell us how things will finally turn out, though I suspect given the restrictions on killing the golden goose that all the main recognisable characters will somehow survive.

It’s another good book in what is turning out to be a complex and surprising adult series of books.

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Charles Packer