Starfighters of Adumar

One thing that is very noticeable is that the situation the protagonists get thrown in in this book is suspiciously specific for their skillsets. Adumar is a slightly backwards world that has just contacted the New Republic and would be open for negotiations. There is one small problem though: they don't want to negotiate with career politicians, they only will accept starfighter pilots as negotiators.
And so Wedge Antilles and a few others from Rogue Squadron end up on Adumar and have to deal with a lot of culture clash and cloak and dagger espionage business. It turns out that Adumar is actually a balkanised world and that they only were contacted by the most powerful nation there, that the Imperials were contacted at the same time and now are competing with them, and that the Adumari are not only fond of starfighter pilots, they are obsessed with them. And with honor. And with honorable feuds to the death. In one of the funniest sequences in the book our heroes are on a stake out when someone else sneaks in and wants to use the same hiding place.

At one point during the later part of the novel our pilot heroes are so fed up with this world and their idea of honorable combat that they'd like to tell them to screw themselves and just go home. But they are our heroes, and so of course they don't and save the day instead.

The novel is not exactly Shakespeare, but it is definitely one of the better Star Wars novels out there. It is fun to read, the worldbuilding is impressive for Star Wars (remember, this is the franchise that gave us such interesting locales as a desert planet, a swamp planet, a city planet, and a Northern Italy planet), and it works as a coherent story on its own.