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Continuing my quest into the Star Wars Expanded Universe brings me to Wedge’s Gamble by Michael A. Stackpole, the second book in the X-Wing series.

As the Rebellion prepare to make their assault on Coruscant, they send Rogue Squadron ahead to prepare the ground, and hopefully make the conquest of this most important part of the Empire a little easier.

I was surprised by how different this book was from Rogue Squadron, the first in the series. Once you’ve gotten through the first few chapters, it starts to take on a completely different style. For a book based around an X-Wing squadron, there was surprisingly little flying actually happened for most of the book.

Instead, the story reads more like an espionage thriller, as the Rogue’s infiltrate Coruscant in disguise, and start to scout out possible targets for when the Rebels begin their attack, trying to find a way to bring down the shields, and prevent a long and drawn out siege of the planet.

It was an odd decision to put the squadron on the ground for the battle, when you’d have thought they’d have been much more use flying alongside Admiral Ackbar’s fleet, which in contrast with things like Endor, is a pretty unremarkable battle. Sure, it provides a different story to the previous book, but that doesn’t work in its favour.

There’s plenty of ground-based action, shootouts, speeder chases, and the like, and we get a chance to look more closely at some of the other characters, like Gavin Darklighter, (cousin of the infamous Biggs Darklighter), but there are large parts of the book where it just drags. As the planning for the assault on Coruscant intensifies, we get more scenes in meeting rooms, with politicians and military leaders, and while it’s nice to see an appearance from Leia, most of these parts are extremely dry, and are certainly some of the weakest parts of the story.

There are also some small references to other novels in the Expanded Universe, like The Truce at Bakura, proving he was either a Star Wars fan to begin with, or else did his research before writing his own works.

Perhaps in hindsight this will be a better novel. Stackpole has built an overarching plot to connect all these books, which lays plenty of intriguing ground work, but Wedge’s Gamble feels like the middle part of the story, with no definite beginning or end, and several big plot lines to be addressed in the next book.

Hopefully the build up will pay off, and The Krytos Trap will provide a return to the dogfights and action the first book did so well.

Star Wars – X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble is available on Amazon.