Crosscurrent

My brother-in-law, who attends comic book conventions from time to time, snared this little goody for me. He knows I have a soft spot for Star Wars novels, so he got me an autographed copy of Crosscurrent by Paul S. Kemp. And it sounded like a great story, at least on the back cover.

Basically it boils down to this: Jedi Knight Jaden Korr receives a vision from the Force. Someone is calling him to a distant planetary system, begging for help. He travels out there, only to arrive in time for an ancient cargo transport to pop in from the past, a past when the Sith had their own empire. Now Jaden and his friends must deal with this ancient threat.

I don't know of another Star Wars story that involves time travel, so I was definitely curious to see how Kemp would pull this off. Sadly, he didn't do so well.

The reason I say that is because really, this book is two unrelated half-stories that have been slapped together. There's the time travel business and then there's what the Force was really trying to show Jaden (which I thought was a lot more interesting). Neither plotline really has anything to do with each other aside from physical proximity (the ship from the past just happens to pop up in the same planetary system as Jaden's true mission). As a result, neither storyline is developed to its full potential, which means that when the story reached its climax, I was wanting more. More character development, more depth to the story, more of just about everything. And that's not wanting more in a good way. It was wanting more because Kemp didn't develop this idea enough.

The up-shot? Crosscurrent is a so-so try at two potentially fun stories that should have had their own individual books.