Status Updates From L'armure Mandalorienne (La ...

Boba Fett had a recording of the aftermath of Luke's aunt and uncle being killed, and apparently Xizor might be involved, and Bossk saw all of this. Just... why? Why are we doing this? Is this trilogy seriously going to somehow link Xizor to fucking Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's death? I cannot imagine anything good coming from this. It's going to be stupid.
Anyways this was meh. Very middling. Could've been worse.

Dengar goes to Mos Eisley to find a contact, learns contact is dead, a stranger walks up and says he's taken up the job and Dengar immediately trusts him. You could at least write it believably...
Jeter claims that Bossk and Zuckuss were teamed up on the TESB job to capture Han, which is straight-up wrong. Zuckuss was with 4-LOM by that point. Tales of BHs came out two years before this, so there isn't that excuse

Fett having a specific building laced with explosives years in advance is a huge stretch, but it is at least believable. Fett also having prepared a blastproof case with a power core intended for a specific individual also years in advance makes absolutely no goddamn sense. Half of this book was all about how he was a lone wolf. Why the hell would he have a plan that explicitly relies on the presence of another?

The Shell Hutts - an offshoot clan of Hutts that encase themselves in armorlike apparatuses - is a fun idea. I like it. The problem is, 'Shell Hutts' is a really dumb name for them. It sounds like how they'd be referred to derogatorily, rather than being their actual name.

So once again Jeter seems to believe that the sarlacc pit was very close to Jabba's palace, which is wrong. Either that or he just decided to write it that way for simplicity, and truth be damned. Also there's this weird notion that has been mentioned a few times where he makes it sound like the Empire is a new and recent formation?? It doesn't make a lick of sense.

Claiming that Twi'leks often fulfill majordomo roles, and then naming the Bounty Hunter's Guild majordomo Ob Fortuna, is some of the laziest shit I have seen in any Expanded Universe novel. Wow. Just wow.
In true EU fashion, this author is way overusing the term barve. I know it was introduced in the Jabba's Palace Fett short story, but you don't need to keep harping on it. It makes it look so forced.

I get what's going on here. This was 2 years after Shadows of the Empire, 1 year after Special Editions OT hit theaters. This is cashing in on the popularity of Fett and Xizor. I think there's merit to giving background to HOW Xizor gained the Emperor's favor. But this is doing it horribly. Long-ass boring chapter of talking in circles. Vader, the Emperor, and even Xizor felt terribly out of character. Bad writing.

This isn't terrible, but it's rather uninteresting thus far. Very slow start. I'm beginning to think that perhaps this is a trilogy that had to stretch its content out to fill 3 books, rather than fitting them organically...
It's strange that this is taking place both around the same time as RotJ, but also flashing back to shortly after EpIV. Weird to jump around that much.

Neelah escaped from Jabba's palace, yet she had a sailbarge cloth wrapped around her, and she witnessed Boba Fett's body after he escaped the sarlacc. That doesn't make any sense. Did Jeter not know that the sarlacc is nowhere near the palace? It's why they had to take the sailbarges. It would've taken Neelah days, if not weeks, to reach it by foot. In the open desert, while being injured.

There's already been a couple of differences from two of the Tales stories. Here, the sarlacc is stated to be dead, but in the Jabba's Palace Fett story, Fett specifically kept it alive (but injured) to kill it at a later date. Also how Dengar came across and rescued Fett was different from the rushed version at the end of the Dengar story, but that's not surprising.

I know next to nothing about this series. I remember seeing them quite often on library shelves, but I never read them. I have recently seen some negative reviews of it, but I'm curious to find out what these are all about.