I can be pretty forgiving where Star Wars is concerned. But the Boba Fett spotlight book Death, Lies & Treachery is just plain awful.

The art by Cam Kennedy is ugly, with monochromatic washes on many pages that make it look like a child's paint-by-numbers book. You know the sort of thing I mean; little Timmy doesn't yet understand the correlation between numbers and colors, so he just paints the whole page green. Kennedy's work is like that.

And the story by John Wagner isn't much better. It's a trilogy of sorts, all putting Fett at the beck and call of a Hutt even more loathsome than Jabba. His primary foe (or, rather, his primary foe and his primary foe's brother) is a caricature that one can't even begin to take seriously.

Of course, one might argue that the cartoony art and silly plotting means this book is aimed at pre-teen readers, but then one might also wonder why there's so much killing.

Death, Lies & Treachery is obviously one of those books publishers print simply because they want to keep popular characters visible on the shelves. Standards, sadly, sometimes fall by the wayside, as in this case. Pass it by.