Ian McDiarmid delivers about ninety seconds of dialogue in Revenge of the Sith about a Sith Lord who could keep the ones he cared about from dying. James Luceno turned those ninety seconds into four hundred pages, and produced the single most complete portrait of how the Empire was actually built.
What it is
A corporate thriller. That sounds like a criticism and is not. Plagueis is a Muun of the banking clans; his instrument is not the lightsaber but the leveraged position. The novel spends its length on succession planning, market manipulation, blackmail and long-horizon investment, and treats the Force experiments as one line item among many. The Sith are shown doing the unglamorous work, and the unglamorous work is the point.
Palpatine
This is the book's real achievement. We meet Palpatine as a young man from a family he despises, before he has a plan, and Luceno resists every temptation to make him precocious. He is recruited, trained, and slowly becomes better at the job than his master — and the moment you realise he has outgrown Plagueis arrives long before either character admits it. By the time the novel reaches the events of The Phantom Menace, you understand exactly why Naboo had to happen and exactly who benefited.
The Plagueis problem
Plagueis himself is the weaker half. Luceno gives him an obsession — the defeat of death — and a great deal of laboratory work, but not much interiority beyond appetite. He is legible as a force and thin as a person. The book partly knows this: its structure quietly hands the reader over from master to apprentice across the middle third.
Luceno's continuity habit
Nobody in Star Wars publishing has ever loved a cross-reference more. Names, ships, minor officials and offhand background details from thirty other books are stitched into this narrative with real care, and if you have read widely it is a genuine pleasure. If you have not, some passages will read as a list. Fair warning: the density is deliberate and it is not going to let up.
Prose
Cool, formal, a little airless — which suits the subject. Luceno writes conspiracy better than he writes action, and wisely there is not much action. The dialogue between the two Sith is the strongest material, all indirection and courtesy over an understanding that one of them will eventually kill the other.
Canon status and why it does not matter
This is a Legends book. Nothing in it is binding on current continuity. It is also the reason a large number of readers understand the prequels at all, and its account of how a republic is dismantled by people following ordinary incentives has aged into something more uncomfortable than it was in 2012.
Who should read it
Anyone who wants the prequel era explained rather than depicted. It works best after you have seen the films and before you read anything else set in the same decade. Do not start your Star Wars reading here — start with Master & Apprentice — but do not leave this one on the shelf.
