The premise of the book is a lot more exciting than the execution -- in fact, when you find yourself using the words "quiet" and "contemplative" about a book that's supposed to deal with the adventures of a bunch of top-notch bounty-hunters, you know that the author has failed at some level....

Instead of being quick-moving and evoking a sense of danger and action, "Slave Ship" is a series of dense, repetitive internal monologues on the part of the characters, mostly carried out while they're sitting motionless.

For example, an entire chapter is used up by Boba Fett punching in one set of coordinates and telling Dengar that he isn't going to tell the other bounty hunter where they're going. Three pages of dense, monolithic paragraphs are expended in a bounty hunter asking the "arachnoid assembler" character -- "is this area really airtight?" and the assembler answering "yes." Literally, 3 pages are taken up with this one question and answer, because of the narrative following the assembler thinking 20 times over what a clown the bounty hunter is, in great detail.

There are the seeds of a story in here, and the book is all right to read when you've got a spare moment to fill, but don't expect anything fast-paced .... the characters drone on for pages about the exact same idea, thinking about the same thing in 40 different ways, and the author seems to think it necessary to use 3 different sentences to describe the sound of Dengar's boots as he climbs down one short ladder after talking to Boba Fett. And on and on and on ....

Nothing much happens, they go after a stormtrooper or something. It's not the worst book ever, but not all that interesting. Also, rehashes too much of stuff from the first book.

The books are entertaining; I read them really quickly. I liked them a lot; as much as I liked the anthologies (Tales from Jabba's Palace, Mos Eisley Cantina, Bounty Hunters) and the Han Solo trilogy, but Jeter's writing style gets a little old after a while -- it seems like over and over again, everybody just keeps sucking up to Boba Fett. He just reiterates what a good bounty hunter Fett is and how everybody else sucks in comparison. I am a Fett fan, and I bought this book because of his involvement (along with numerous other novels which don't have much of the bounty hunter in it, as promised) so I enjoyed it anyway.

This is the second volume of the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy. I read this book not too long ago and I'm already fuzzy on what exactly happened in it. The storylines began in "The Mandalorian Armor" have not been advanced much, except for what happened off screen. Boba Fett, having been rescued by Dengar, is trying to convince the galaxy that he is still dead, so he is hiding his true identity while going into business with Dengar. There is a lot of backstory going on (which I call the previous book). Then, in the other storyline occurring in the past we have found out that the Bounty Hunters Guild has splintered into two fragments. Xizor is still trying to destroy the Guild even farther so all that is left is individual, highly motivated, bounty hunters.

There is far too much backstory and characters explaining things and trying to find out how everything fits together. There is plenty of chapters with Kuat of Kuat and his shipbuilding yards and Kuat trying to hold onto the control he has over the Kuat Driveyards. "Slave Ship" is just a tedious book that takes far too long to accomplish far too little story and action. There were a couple of decent scenes (trying to capture the Imperial defector was very good), but overall this was just a fairly weak novel and was very, very disappointing.

Hopefully the concluding volume of this trilogy will be far better, because if I wasn't trying to read all of the Star Wars novels this would be a complete waste of my time.

-Joe Sherry

Slave Ship (Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars, Book 2)
by K.W. Jeter, continues the story of Boba Fett immediately after the debacle in the Sarlaac's belly and in flashback to a time at the beginnings of the galactic rebellion. Jeter continues to weave in interesting characters and to make tell interesting tales, but his inclusion of the Kuati storyline makes the thrust of the trilogy increasingly predictable. He also spends too much time in Fett's head, rather than drawing primarily on people's reactions to Fett, which would make the authors point but at the same time keep an air of mystery about the bounty hunter. OVerall, Jeter writes a solid if prediactable tale outside the normal Star Wars genera, which does tend to keep the storyline nice and dark, a change during a time period when the expanded universe seemed to be going through a bit of a dry spell in the original ideas department. His ideas are new, but the way he implements them makes this book predictable but still enjoyable.