Prepare yourself for a nonstop Leia-fest. The New Republic's new leader is back in bondage again, but at least this time she doesn't have Jabba the Hut slobbering all over her. Kidnapped after a clandestine mission to the former prison-planet Nam Chorios goes awry, Leia relies on her wits, her ever-developing Jedi powers (including some mean saber-swinging), and her pals to escape, survive, and resolve the conflict on the desolate planet. Han, Chewie, and Lando may get short shrift in Planet of Twilight, but Luke gets in some good scenes on the trail of Force-sensitive babe Callista, and the droids provide more than their share of laughs. While veteran writer Hambly doesn't subscribe to the admittedly entertaining shut-up-and-start-blasting school of Star Wars writing, her skilled characterizations and more literary stylings are a welcome addition to the fold. --Paul Hughes


From Library Journal
Another installment in a best-selling series from veteran Star WarsR author Hambly.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Hambly's previous Star Wars novel, Children of the Jedi (1995), was arguably the finest in the successful movie spin-off series. This one is just as good. On a grisly desert planet called Nam Chorios, two factions are battling for power. One kidnaps Leia Organa Solo, sending Han, Luke, and the two droids on a desperate chase after her, with Luke also seeking his beloved Callista, who is supposed to be on Nam Chorios. Meanwhile, one faction spreads a murderous plague, and remnants of the overthrown empire threaten to join the party. In due course, everybody is united on Nam Chorios--Luke after a starship crash, Leia after a hairbreadth escape, and Han and the droids after surviving a planetary crisis (a savage parody of current real-world Balkan warfare). Eventually, Luke realizes that Callista must go on alone until she regains her Force powers, the crystals that are being exported from Nam Chorios as weapons are recognized as sapient life-forms, and our old friend Admiral Daala at last abandons the crumbling imperial cause for the cause of peace. Hambly is superior to most of the other SW authors at vivid world building, humor (she does Ce-ethreepio marvelously well), and understanding the characters. This book deserves an audience extending far beyond that of fans responding to its movie tie-in nature. Roland Green


Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Barbara Hambly returns to the Star Wars(r) universe to tell a breathtaking tale of a mysterious world where the battle between the New Republic and the Empire takes a shocking new twist....Nam Chorios is a barren backwater world--once a dreaded prison colony, now home to a fanatic religious cult. It is here that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a ruthless and charismatic warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Meanwhile, Luke lands on a mysterious planet in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover the Force is his own worst enemy. But worst of all, as Han, Chewie, and Lando leave Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens...a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything--both Empire and New Republic--on its path to domination.


From the Publisher
The Star Wars® saga continues in hardcover. Renat Chorios is abackwater land that serves as a sanctuary for a peaceful religious cult. Butpeace is threatened with the rise of a sinister warlord who takes Princess Leiahostage by tricking her into attending a diplomatic meeting. Meanwhile Lukecontinues his search for his lost love, and finds that the force has someuncontrollable and deadly powers in this strange land. At the center of theturmoil lies a once-dormant life form capable of destroying the entiregalaxy.

, (TM) and 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.


From the Inside Flap
New York Times bestselling author Barbara Hambly returns to the Star Wars(r) universe to tell a breathtaking tale of a mysterious world where the battle between the New Republic and the Empire takes a shocking new twist....

Nam Chorios is a barren backwater world--once a dreaded prison colony, now home to a fanatic religious cult. It is here that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a ruthless and charismatic warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Meanwhile, Luke lands on a mysterious planet in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover the Force is his own worst enemy. But worst of all, as Han, Chewie, and Lando leave Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens...a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything--both Empire and New Republic--on its path to domination.


About the Author
Barbara Hambly attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer. She is at work on the fourth Benjamin January novel, Sent Down the River.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.

One of his fellow crewmembers on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room, where he'd repaired half an hour previously for a cup of coffeine. Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that he'd clicked into the infolog banks "just to see if anybody mentions the mission."

Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission.  Though accompanied by the Adamantine, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo's journey to the Meridian sector was an entirely unofficial one.  The Rights of Sentience Party would have argued--quite correctly--that Seti Ashgad, the man she was to meet at the rendezvous point just outside the Chorios systems, held no official position on his homeworld of Nam Chorios.  To arrange an official conference would be to give tacit approval of his, and the Rationalist Party's, demands.

Which was, when it came down to it, the reason for the talks.

When she entered the deck nine break room, Sergeant Wover's first sight was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen  "Blast it, Koth, I told you..."

Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen, head on the break table, eyes shut.  Even at a distance of three meters Wover didn't like the way he was breathing.

"Koth!"  She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering into a corner.  She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled his name.  "Koth!"

Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision.  In the few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers.  It wasn't even cold.  A thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth optimistically referred to as his mustache.  The stuff in the cup smelled okay--at least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelled--and there was no question of alcohol or drugs.  Not on a Republic escort.  Not where Koth was concerned.  He was a good kid.

Wover was an engine room regular who'd done fifteen years in merchant planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine's goons gained power: she looked after "her" midshipmen as if they were the sons she'd lost to the Rebellion.  She would have known if there had been trouble with booze or spice or giggle-dust.

Disease?

It was any longtime spacer's nightmare.  But the "good-faith" team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had passed through the medical scan; and in any ease, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus.  Everyone on the Light of Reason had come straight from the planet.

Still, Wover pecked the Commander's code on the wall panel.

"Sir?  Wover here.  One of the midshipmen's down.  The meds haven't gotten here yet but..."  Behind her the break room door swooshed open.  She glanced over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad holovid.  "It looks serious.  No, sir, I don't know what it is, but you might want to check with Her Excellency's flagship, and the Light, and let them know.  Okay, okay," she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her.  "My heart is yours," she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clickety-click as it laboriously assembled the 85 percent probability that the remark was a jest.

"Many thanks, Sergeant Wover," it said politely, "but the organ itself will not be necessary.  A function reading will suffice."

The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up.  Every line of the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound.  "Festering groats!"  Wover yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy's side.  "What in the name of daylight ...?"

Barak's face had gone a waxen gray.  The table was already pumping stimulants and antishock into the boy's veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into the other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other stations within the ship.  Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit's sides.

No virus.  No bacteria.  No poison.

No foreign material in Koth Barak's body at all.

The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.


"We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency."  Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation viewport, to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of the lounge's gray leather chairs.

"We meaning whom, Master Ashgad?"  Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect.  A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have surprised anyone who didn't know that from the age of seventeen she'd been heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great stateswoman Mon Mothma: with her father's death, she was virtually its core.  She'd commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy with a price on her head before she was twenty-three.  She was thirty-one now and didn't look it, except for her eyes.  "The inhabitants of Nam Chorios?  Or only some of them?"

"All of them."  Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she remained in her chair.  But she looked up at him with an expression in her brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to do, and he stepped back.  "All of us," he corrected himself.  "Newcomers and Therans alike."

Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden lamps overhead and of the distant stars hanging in darkness beyond the curved bubble of the port.  Even five years ago she would have remarked tartly on the fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of the planet's population, those who were neither the technological post-Imperial Newcomers nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold and waterless wastes, but ordinary farmers.  Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.

"I should explain," Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely resembled the recordings she had heard of his father's, "that Nam Chorios is a barren and hostile world.  Without massive technology it is literally not possible to make a living there."

"The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have managed for the past seven hundred years."

The man looked momentarily nonplussed.  Then he smiled, big and wide and white. "Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector."  He tried to sound pleased about it.

"Enough to know the background of the situation," replied Leia pleasantly.  "I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners there, in the hopes that they'd starve to death, and set automated gun stations all over the planet to keep them from being rescued.  I know not only that the prisoners didn't oblige them by dying but that their descendants--and the descendants of the guards--are still farming the water seams while the Grissmath homeworld of Meridias itself is just a ball of charred radioactive waste."

There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries.  The only reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that her father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be using Nam Chorios for its original purpose: as a prison world.  Forty years ago it had been rumored that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine.  Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a blackhaired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared, had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the planet and asked to be heard.

Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.

Do not meet with Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her flagship.  Do not trust him, or accede to any demand that he makes.  Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.

"Very good!"  He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser.  "But the situation isn't as simple as that, of course."

From a corner of the lounge, where a dark-leaved dyanthis vine shadowed the area near the observation port, a soft voice whispered, "They never are, are they?"

"Well, I was given to understand that the only inhabitants of the planet before colonization recommenced after the fall of the Empire were descendants of the original Meridian prisoners and guards."

In the shadow of the vine, Ashgad's secretary, Dzym, smiled.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It all begins on a barren backwater world called Renat Chorios - once a dreaded prison colony, now home to the Therans, a fanatic religious cult. To this exiled world has come the ruthless warlord Seti Draconis, who seeks to exploit the vast crystalline deserts that cover the planet's desolate surface. The first step in his plan is to lure Princess Leia to Renat Chorios for a diplomatic meeting, only to hold her hostage in his isolated fortress. His ultimate goal is to destroy the Therans, take over the planet, and sell its valuable crystals to the remnants of the Empire, who will use the crystals to develop unstoppable deep-space missiles that will turn the tide of war against the New Republic. With Leia as his hostage, there is nothing to stop him. Meanwhile, Luke lands on Renat Chorios in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover that any use of the Force has unexpectedly deadly consequences. To make matters worse, a plague is decimating the New Republic fleet as it faces attack from overwhelming imperial forces led by Moff Getelles and his henchman, Admiral Larm. As Han, Chewie, and Lando set out from Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, as Leia seeks to escape the evil Draconis, and as Luke searches through a world torn by plague and riots to find Callista, the planet begins to reveal its unspeakable secret: a long dormant sentient life-form kept in check for centuries is now threatening to gain dominance over the New Republic, the Empire, and the entire galaxy!

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

With the Star Wars films soaring in theaters, interest in Hambly's sequel to her Children of the Jedi (1995) should be high-and, as usual, Hambly meets the challenge. In this latest episode in the never-ending saga, the New Republic, like any fledgling organization, is suffering growing pangs. As chief of state, Princess Leia Organa Solo has the thankless task of handling diplomatic relations with the distant Chorios system, represented by the charismatic Seti Ashgad. Leader of the progressive Rationalist Party, Ashgad seeks economic alliance-an arrangement Chorios's fanatically conservative "Oldtimer" majority views with outright hostility. As Luke Skywalker sets off to find the reincarnated Jedi Callista on Ashgad's homeworld, Ashgad kidnaps Leia and sets off a sinister plot to remove the rest of his opposition one by one. See-Threepio and Artoo-Deetoo's luckless attempts to warn the Republican Council of Leia's kidnapping provide comic relief, while Han Solo leads the cavalry that rides to the rescue just in time. Hambly juggles it all with consummate skill, investing convincing characters and settings with plenty of vigor. As media tie-ins go, this one is on the upper end of the curve and is sure to be a hit with casual Star Wars fans as well as longtime admirers.

Publishers Weekly

With the Star Wars films soaring in theaters, interest in Hambly's sequel to her Children of the Jedi (1995) should be highand, as usual, Hambly meets the challenge. In this latest episode in the never-ending saga, the New Republic, like any fledgling organization, is suffering growing pangs. As chief of state, Princess Leia Organa Solo has the thankless task of handling diplomatic relations with the distant Chorios system, represented by the charismatic Seti Ashgad. Leader of the progressive Rationalist Party, Ashgad seeks economic alliancean arrangement Chorios's fanatically conservative "Oldtimer" majority views with outright hostility. As Luke Skywalker sets off to find the reincarnated Jedi Callista on Ashgad's homeworld, Ashgad kidnaps Leia and sets off a sinister plot to remove the rest of his opposition one by one. See-Threepio and Artoo-Deetoo's luckless attempts to warn the Republican Council of Leia's kidnapping provide comic relief, while Han Solo leads the cavalry that rides to the rescue just in time. Hambly juggles it all with consummate skill, investing convincing characters and settings with plenty of vigor. As media tie-ins go, this one is on the upper end of the curve and is sure to be a hit with casual Star Wars fans as well as longtime admirers. (May) FYI: In June, Bantam will publish Hambly's historical mystery, A Free Man of Color.

VOYA - Nancy K. Wallace

While Luke Skywalker sets out to find Callista, his lost love from Children of the Jedi (Bantam, 1995/VOYA October 1995, Leia Organa Solo, chief of state of the New Republic, is kidnapped by an evil duo intent on releasing The Death Seed, a particularly virulent strain of deadly plague. Han and Lando launch immediate rescue efforts and the two charming droids, See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, separated from their human companions, have their own madcap adventure. Replete with excitement, danger, and imaginative aliens, Hambly's sequel to her last Star Wars novel, carefully ties in the original movie trilogy and preceding series novels. While it helps to have kept up up with previous books, this novel stands alone as a good, old fashioned, action-packed adventure story. Character development, however, also is an important part of Hambly's novels, and this one is no exception. Through Callista's training, Leia is responsible for her first victory as a warrior, not just a diplomat. While the romantics around us might hope Luke and Callista might forge a lasting alliance, she remains out of reach, and he is left alone again. From carnivorous fungi and life-draining insects to a strange planet that dangerously warps the power of the force, this page-turner rates a place in any Star Wars collection. VOYA Codes: 4Q 4P M J S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses, Broad general YA appeal, Middle School-defined as grades 6 to 8, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

Library Journal