Thrawn accepts a difficult challenge and returns to form after a disappointing 2nd book. The storyline fits between two TV story arcs, on Rebels I believe. The epilogue plays to that directly - and is useless to me.

I liked the interactions with Faro. Vanto was a bit confusing - he was in the first book as well, and I'd need to go back and check how the relation was there. A few of the larger plot points carry one from the second book, with Vader playing almost no role. I found the space battle scenes well described.

My reviews keep repeating this, but I haven't seen Rebels. This isn't a point in Zahn's favor here - he uses a lot of characters and situations that the reader may not know. Not good. The epilogue is the worst example of that. The Grysk, bad guys from the last two books, come out into the open and... aren't that scary. Finding the weak points and nightmares of a species hardly seems compelling to me, but it is their major point - often said, never demonstrated.

I found the first book in the series pretty good, 3.5 stars. That makes rating this one easy - better than the first? 4 stars or more. Worse? 3 stars or less. For me, this was the latter. The goodreads ratings of the books in the series (4, 2, 3) average to a 3, but I would knock that back to a 2 also - the books agree but the stories don't really complement - perhaps they should be considered add-ons for the tv show.

If you like the blue guy, there is apparently another trilogy called "Thrawn Ascendancy". Not sure how that connects with these, but I'll wait to see what other reviewers think before diving in.