Michael Scott (author of the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, lets his love of myth and folklore seep through in this tale which pitches Jamie McCrimmon and the Second Doctor against evil from the dawn of time. It also features a lot of continuity references (cunning aliases, Atlantis, alliances with untrustworthy alien races, The Highlanders, and Vengeance on Varos all crop up), and an ending that will divide opinion; I thought it worked quite well, the explanation combining seemingly disparate plots points, but possibly for those of you of the ‘No, stop that. It’s silly’ persuasion it will prove irksome. It may already have inspired one of the songs on the new My Bloody Valentine album. In trying to appeal to the wide audience of Doctor Who, Scott’s writing is diverse in tone, and the changes sometimes jar. We have unnatural geometry and a race of Old One-type beings complete with creeping dread, but we also have the Doctor and Jamie undercutting this by just being themselves. It’s not a typical story from their era (if anything, Jamie is the one putting a base under siege), although it does have elements of cosiness to it. The characters of the regulars are well drawn. Troughton’s Doctor goes from morose to bumbling to ‘Oh my giddy aunt’, and Jamie gets to yell Creag an tuire before accidentally bringing a copy of the Necronomicon on board the TARDIS. Read Andrew’s review of the previous Doctor Who Puffin ebook, A Big Hand for the Doctor, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
