A review by dmcke013
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

5.0

This is pretty much the book that re-ignited the whole Star Wars craze. (Re)reading it, it's not hard to see why.

Set after the events of the original trilogy, "Heir to the Empire" also introduces a host of new characters and soon-to-be-official aliens and planet names (it is here that Coruscant is first named, for example).

Reading the trilogy as a whole, though, you also have to wonder how much inside-info Zahn had on the whole Star Wars mythos: clones are (re)introduced here, the Clone Wars are given a larger role than their original throw-away reference and the role of the Jedi are expanded upon.

I know there's a lot of hostility towards spin-off books, but do yourself a favour and read this one! After all, the original material had to be good for their to BE a spin-off in the first place, and the quality of the first spin-off can often be determined by the quantity of books that followed it ...