Bennie Mosher

Father. Husband. Problem Solver. Software Engineer.

The Old Republic: Deceived

Jun 8, 2026

After the frustration of Revan’s unfinished story, Deceived gave me exactly what I had been waiting for — a Sith villain who actually feels like a Sith villain. Darth Malgus is the real deal, and this book wasted no time proving it.

Book cover

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 stars

Malgus was everything I expected a Sith to be and wasn’t in the previous book. The dark side feeds him. It doesn’t corrupt him or confuse him — it powers him. Watching him operate is like watching a force of nature that happens to carry a lightsaber. The fight scenes in this book are on another level entirely. Detailed, cinematic, visceral. You can see every move. I found myself slowing down during the combat sequences just to take them in properly, which is not something I do.

The story follows two parallel tracks — Malgus on one side, and Zeerid and Aryn on the other. Zeerid is a former Republic special forces soldier running spice to pay for his daughter’s medical care, and Aryn is a Jedi who just lost her master and is not handling it the way the Jedi Council would prefer. Their story is quieter than Malgus’ but it earns its place. By the end I genuinely cared what happened to both of them.

And then the epilogue happened. What starts as a war story quietly becomes something else entirely — two broken people choosing each other over the galaxy’s expectations of them. I did not expect a love story in a Star Wars novel about a Sith sacking the Jedi Temple, but here we are and I am not complaining.

One thing worth noting for readers coming straight from Revan — the chapter structure is different. Revan’s chapters were roughly ten minutes of reading each, easy to knock out one at a time. Deceived’s chapters run closer to twenty pages, about a half hour each. It actually made the book feel like it moved faster overall, but it’s a different rhythm and worth knowing going in.

The ending is satisfying in a way Revan simply was not. Questions get answered. Characters land somewhere. It is a complete story. After Revan that felt like a gift.

My only frustration is the same one I always have with this era — Malgus disappears into the MMO after this and his full story never gets told in print. What happens to him after the epilogue, where he goes, whether he ever crosses paths with Aryn again — none of it exists in a book. That story deserves to be written.

Read this one. It is the best of the Old Republic novels so far and the fight scenes alone are worth it.

This is part of my ongoing Star Wars Legends chronological read-through. I’m reading every Legends novel in the order events happen in the galaxy, starting 25,000 years before the Battle of Yavin. Next up: The Old Republic: Red Harvest.