As with the first Darth Bane book, it's disquieting trying to relate to main characters who are unredeemably evil. You can't like them, but they're the focus of the action. The novel has some non-evil characters, Jedi and non-Jedi, but, inevitably, things don't go well for them. This fills in some gaps in the Star Wars mythos, but since we know the Sith survive up to the era of the movies, there isn't really that much dramatic tension in the plot.

Still, it's well-written and should be appealing to die-hard Star Wars fiction fans.