Mara becomes the cold mercenary that Han once tried to convince everyone he was, except we knew underneath that hard exterior laid a heart of gold. From what we could tell, if Mara had a heart it was made of the deepest coldest Hoth ice. Her relationship with Luke is a bizarre one that fluctuates from barely disguised hatred to mixed signals one might read as flirting, or friendship, or plain desperation borne from loneliness. Luke doesn't seem to be too phased by all of it, he merely takes whatever it is she will give him, and when she retreats he is not offended. He tries to train her as a Jedi, as he knows of her Force talent, and she halfheartedly agrees. He even gives her a very personal gift, his father's lightsaber, and this does not seem to reach her. We come away thinking that he is way too good for her, and he should have told her to get lost a long time ago . . . but Luke is too good a guy to do that.

Enter Timothy Zahn once more. Bantam needed to finish off their run of SW books and they wanted their most popular author to write the final novel.

As we are to understand it, as noted in the following quote from an interview with Tim Zahn done by Echo Station (and in other interviews he's done as well) he agreed to write it on two conditions: one, he got to finally end the tiresome cold (and sometimes hot) war between the remnants of the Empire and the New Republic . . . and second, he got to pair up Luke and Mara.