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Second entry in Michael A Stackpole's Star Wars: X-Wing series (a total of 10 novels, the first four written by Stackpole and centring around a reconstituted Rogue Squadron), following on from'Rogue Squadron' and taking as its inspiration the old LucasArt X-Wing/TIE fighter series of computer games. Hadn't read books these since the late 90s.

These novels (and the aforementioned games, now all considered 'Legends' by Disney) are my head-canon of what the sequel trilogy should have been.

Anyway, in this novel in particular, the action now moves from space to the city-planet of Coruscant, the seat of the Imperial Government that took over from the Old Republic and - in the Legends continuity at least - also that of the New Republic.

Here, we have the members of Rogue Squadron infiltrating said city planet and looking for a way to bring down the planetary shields so that the rest of the fleet can arrive, but they may be playing into the villain-of-the-piece Ysanne Isard's hands in so doing ...

For anybody that hasn't read this, it ends in a massive cliff-hanger, so be warned you'll be wanting to move onto the sequel 'The Krytos Trap' not long after finishing it ...
  
The third and final entry in AJ MacKenzie's 'The Hundred Years War' series which, truth to be told, did not turn out at all as I expected.

By which I mean I was expecting something Cornwell-like; an action-adventure set during the period of The Hundred Years War between France and England over the throne of France.

What I got instead was a (I felt) slow-burner of a mystery over three novels, with the war really only providing the backdrop as the herald Simon Merrivale investigates a shadowy conspiracy amongst the nobles of both sides

The fault in expectation, of course, was wholly mine.

This follows on from the largely-Scotland set A Clash of Lions, itself following on from A Flight of Arrows, with Merrivale now back in France as the English besiege the key city of Calais. I have to say, I did find parts of this novel to drag on a bit: for me, it never really gripped me as much as parts of the previous entry did. One of those novels (and series) that I'm happy enough to have read, but not to the point where I would - yet - search out more by the author.