Patterns of Force (Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)...but was simply too ridiculous to pull it off.
Another reviewer on here wrote about the "silly" things in this series and I agree with that review. Reaves, who did so well with the MedStar books, should have stayed out of Jedi lore and delivered more Star Wars through another perspective. Much like Traviss really shines when she deals with non-Jedi (the Clones and Mandalorians) Reaves' medical personnel and media hounds were truly interesting to read. Some people just shouldn't be allowed to muck about with lightsabers and Force-religion.
The Coruscant Nights Trilogy tries too hard. I appreciate the attempt at having a noir feel - in fact, I think it's a great idea. I don't think that having a Jedi play Private Eye is such a good idea. It comes off completely silly, trite, and campy. Were the character of Jax Pavan a normal citizen, or perhaps a law enforcement agent, a reporter, or even a person with just a slight affinity for the Force, these books could have been fantastic. The conflict could have existed on a level of a lone do-gooder against a corrupt system. We could have seen the bad guy be an Imperial agent, an Imperial enforcer - something. However, since he's a full-fledged Jedi Knight, we get such ridiculous things thrown in here for "excitement" (enter, the Inquisitors, and the "Inquisitorius"- an entire legion of Dark Side users) that this turns into a complete turn-off. The Inquisitors were one of the worst additions to Star Wars lore that I have ever come across. Suddenly we have Vader training dozens (perhaps even hundreds?) of Force-users in the Dark Side to hunt down other Force-users and rogue Jedi. I mean, there's the whole "Rule of Two" thing, plus one would think that any Force-users would be seen as a threat to the Palpatine/Vader regime. Plus, the idea of an Inquisitorius is such a big one that it makes a strange gap in continuity that we've never heard about it at any point until now.
And one character's use of the Force is so beyond a level we've ever seen before and he's not even fully trained? This kid, who's never had any instruction, mind you, is vaporizing people with the Force. How many Masters of the Force have we seen or heard of doing this? And some teenage kid is pulling it off with "just instinct."
Light sculptures shielding the Force from detection? Ugh. Don't get me started.
And Vader going on a "bad trip" (an actual quote from the book) when he takes some bota? Good God, the last thing I want to see is the Dark Lord himself having some drug freak out.
Plus, Reaves' characterization of Vader is just awful. His dialogue is never right, his motives and actions are so un-Vader-ish that I had to keep reminding myself that it was the same character. At one point, he asks if his display of an imprisoned character's post-torture state is too disturbing and distracting, and so he removes the character from view with a very sarcastic sense of "is that better, now? insert-evil-laughter-here." It was much too Bond-villain for me. He tortured Han and Leia and let the reverberations in the Force be enough punishment/lure for Luke. Why the petty display through hologram for Jax? It's just lame.
And Reaves is apparently in love with his own grasp of vocabulary. The sentences are often long, clunky, and way too wordy to even be enjoyable to read. At times I had to put the book down and stop reading simply because I felt as if I were reading a thesaurus.
This series isn't the worst Star Wars I've ever read, but it's fairly close. I would recommend this to people who are die-hard only since anyone who doesn't have an extremely strong sense of love for the Star Wars franchise will see that love extinguished by this trilogy.

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After the Empire's bloody purge of the Jedi, one lone Knight still fights for those who cannot, unaware that he's about to be swept into a cataclysmic battle against the Master of Darkness himself.Throughout the galaxy, a captured Jedi is a dead Jedi, even in Coruscant's most foul subterranean slums, where Jedi Knight Jax Pavan champions the causes of the oppressed with the help of hard-nosed reporter Den Dhur and the wisecracking droid I-5YQ. But Jax is also involved in another struggle–to unlock the secrets of his father's death and his own past.While Jax believes that I-5YQ holds some of those answers, he never imagines that the truth could be shocking enough to catapult him to the frontlines of a plot to kill Emperor Palpatine. Worse yet, Darth Vader's relentless search for Jax is about to end . . . in triumph. The future looming over the valiant Jedi and his staunch pals promises to be dark and brief, because there's no secret whatsoever about the harshest truth of all: Few indeed are those who tangle with Darth Vader . . . and live to tell the tale.

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