He's also trying to figure out what happened to his old friend Anakin Skywalker after the great purge. In Patterns of Force Jax Pavan is still trying to track down the secret behind the death of his father. Michael Reaves has written several other Star Wars novels since then. (This reminds me a lot of the episodes of pretty much all the Star Treks – bad things happen, good things happen, reset.) Of course it helped that the main character was one of his own and not one of the franchise mainstays that you can't kill because, let's face it who would read a book where Han Solo got killed (or believe it)? This moved Michael Reaves onto my short list of authors who write awesome Star Wars.Īlas, his presence thereon was short lived. After each story there is a reset button that puts everything back to The Way It Was. Too often in Star Wars the authors are afraid to have anything permanently damaging happen.

In Reaves first Star Wars book I was impressed with his willingness to kill his main character. Reaves brought it all together well and made it feel, at times, like perhaps there was a small chance that some of the characters might live.īut the janitor, Lorn Pavan, had a son named Jax who just happened to be Force sensitive and accepted to the temple as a Padawan. To anybody familiar with Darth Maul there is no doubting the conclusion.

Darth Maul sets out on a quest to destroy that janitor and his droid. Years ago Michael Reaves wrote a book about a janitor working in the Jedi temple who discovers the existence of the Sith. 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. Worse yet, Darth Vader's relentless search for Jax is about to end. 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. But Jax is also involved in another struggle-to unlock the secrets of his father's death and his own past. 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.

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.

Patterns of force michael reaves