Pencils: Olivier Vatine, Fred Blanchard
Inks: Olivier Vatine, Fred Blanchard
Colors: Isabelle Rabarot
Letters: Ellie DeVille
Cover Artist: Tom Jung, Mathieu Lauffray

Shortly after dealing with Warlord Zsinj, the fledgling New Republic faces their most difficult challenge yet in the form of the military genius Thrawn. Thrawn was an Imperial Grand Admiral who liked to use a species art to determine their weaknesses, and he was very good at it. As the last Grand Admiral, he felt it was his duty to destroy the Rebellion so that the Empire could rise again. The first major step in this plan was to steal a large number of New Republic warships and get his own Dark Jedi to help him coordinate his forces. Thrawn found Joruus C'baoth (an insane clone of the original Jorus C'baoth) guarding one of the Emperor's storehouses, and convinced him to join the cause by offering him Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Leia's unborn twins. Leia, as usual, is running diplomatic missions for the New Republic and Luke is trying to decide how he is going to restart the Jedi Order, but neither of them proves to be as easy to capture as Thrawn initially expected. Leia manages to evade all capture, but Luke finds himself a prisoner of the smuggler Talon Karrde and his associate Mara Jade, who has a deep hatred of Luke coupled with the desire to kill him.

This is the first book of the Thrawn trilogy, written by Timothy Zahn and later adapted into comic book form, and is also the first Star Wars novel to have been published in almost 10 years. The Thrawn trilogy is widely recognized as being among the best Star Wars novels ever written. One of the great things about this book is the sheer amount of stories going on at the same time and yet it never feels as though the book becomes too unwieldy because each small story is an important part of the larger whole.

The 20th Anniversary Edition Of Heir to the Empire is a reprint of the original work, with annotations by the author Timothy Zahn and his editor Betsy Mitchell. The annotations give insight into the writing process, explains his inspiration for characters and plot points as well as give points where the finished product differed from his original script. I highly recommend this edition to anyone who enjoys Star Wars literature, whether you already own the story or not.