Star Wars: Scum and Villainy- Case Files on The Galaxy's Most Notorious

A beautifully-illustrated oddity.

  This beautiful slipcased hardcover is a true odd-duck item: A book comprised of case-history snippets and wanted posters and surveillance footage stills that tell the story of crime in the era of the STAR WARS movies, as told by three generations of a law-enforcement family.

 The real draw here is the art, which is all fully-painted and nearly photo-realistic. Anyone should be able to flip to any page in this book and appreciate the artistry that has gone into every page. Reading it, however....is a different story. Author Pablo Hidalgo does a good job of telling the story of the Divo family between the lines of the case files, but you have to be a true, hardcore STAR WARS fan to really appreciate all of what is going on here. It'd say that I fully understood about 1/3rd to 1/2 of what was presented in this book, and I consider myself pretty well-versed in STAR WARS lore. (At least I used to be, before Disney purged all of the extended universe stories of the past few decades from canon.) There are fun callbacks to films like SOLO and ROGUE ONE, and appearances from favorites like Boba Fett, Jabba The Hutt, Aurra Sing, Quinlan Vos, and many others that more casual fans will recognize and appreciate, but so much of this book and the so many of the characters in it were a complete mystery to me, that I had to take a few stars away. A few pages in the back telling interested readers where they could go to find out more about the characters in the book would have been appreciated, and would have helped Disney sell more books.

 Physically, this is a stunning production- A gorgeous hardcover printed on heavy, glossy stock, and housed in an attractive clear vinyl slipcase. (My experience as a book lover has been that slipcases like this don't hold up long, as the glue rots away, but...we'll see.) STAR WARS: SCUM AND VILLAINY- CASE FILES ON THE GALAXY'S MOST NOTORIOUS earns seven out of ten manacles:⛓⛓⛓⛓⛓⛓⛓
and makes for some fun reading, and is a feast for the eyes; Just be prepared to refer to Wikipedia occasionally.

Epic Ink provided a review copy