Star Wars: Crosscurrent equals SW: Book Fail

Jacket Description:

"An ancient Sith ship hurtles into the future carrying a lethal cargo that could forever destroy Luke Skywalker’s hopes for peace. (Really?)

The Civil War is almost over when Jedi Knight Jaden Korr experiences a Force vision so intense he must act. Enlisting two salvage jocks and their ship, Jaden sets out into space. Someone—or something—appears to be in distress.

But what Jaden and his crew find confounds them. A five-thousand-year-old dreadnaught—bringing with it a full force of Sith and one lone Jedi—has inadvertently catapulted eons from the past into the present. The ship’s weapons may not be cutting-edge, but its cargo, a special ore that makes those who use the dark side nearly invincible, is unsurpassed. The ancient Jedi on board is determined to destroy the Sith. But for Jaden, even more is at stake: for his vision has led him to uncover a potentially indestructible threat to everything the Jedi Order stands for."

My Thoughts: (SW Book Fail)
For Amanda's birthday, we decided to get out of the house and go to Barnes and Noble.  While there, I finished reading Paul Kemp's Star Wars Crosscurrent.  All I can say is that I was mildly impressed.  As an avid Star Wars reader and one who knows his way around the expanded universe, I am always a little leery of one shot novels that don't really advance the story line.  Needless to say, I was not disappointed in my skepticism.  Kemp's plot seemed out of place in the SW Universe and it felt clunky.  His characters were hard to fall in love with and when some came to an unfortunate demise, I was left mildly apathetic.  This story failed to capture me.

For the first time in SW history, a couple of beings travel through time mixing Star Trek and Star Gate in a way that was very out of place in the SW timeline and didn't seem to advance current SW plots.  All the while, the Jedi wrestled with a Force philosophy that discussed genetic engineering, a person's inherent Force nature, and whether a Dark-sider has uncontrollable urges.  Given the nature of mainstream Force philosophies (Living Force and Unifying Force), I'm not sure what Kemp was attempting to prove other than his apparent lack of Force understanding.

Their was no definite conclusion to the book which leads me to believe that Lucas Books is attempting to create a new story-arch with all new characters outside of the current Classic Trilogy and Prequel Trilogy characters.  If my suspicion is correct, since I am a glutton for punishment (I did read all the Bantam series), I will probably read the next book in the series hoping for different results.