Jules Jones

73) James Goss -- Torchwood: Department X [audiobook]

One of the audio-only tie-in novels, read by Kai Owen on 2 CDs, and set between series 2 and 3.

The last of Cardiff's traditional department stores, GR Owen, has just gone into administration. A pair of very slick operators from the administrators have arrived to audit the company's assets, and it's clear that they're interested in more than just the usual stock and staff assets. They're not the only ones, because two of the staff present to be interviewed happen to be Ianto and Gwen, working undercover on a project of Jack's. Nobody has seen the Department of Curiosities since 1905, and Jack wants to know why. Pity the store tries to kill him every time he sets foot in it...

A well-constructed story with a very Torchwood feel to it, and some logical extrapolations of the Torchwood universe. It's very funny in places, not least because it openly references the similarities between GR Owen and Grace Brothers in Are you Being Served -- I particularly enjoyed the scene where Jack has some fun teasing Ianto about working in menswear.

Very enjoyable, although I think not quite as good as Ghost Train, also written by James Goss and read by Kai Owen. I was mildly irritated in this one by Kai Owen's habit of leaving a Significant Pause so that you know he's finished speaking dialogue and moved to the dialogue tag. He didn't do this in Ghost Train, because it was first person and thus didn't really have dialogue tags. It's a distracting irritation from an otherwise good reader.

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63) Gareth Roberts -- Doctor Who: Only Human

Fifth of the New Who novels, with Nine, Rose, and Captain Jack. A Neanderthal turns up in 21st century Bromley, and the Tardis crew turn up to investigate why someone is using a particularly primitive, and stupid, method of time travel in the area. It transpires that there's no way to take Das the Neanderthal home without killing him, so Jack gets detailed to teach him how to survive in present-day Bromley, while the Doctor and Rose go back 28,000 years to find the source of the problem. What they find is a historical research project by a group of humans from Rose's future, and some very nasty things hiding in the project's storeroom...

It's an engaging enough story with some good one-off characters, although the Big Bad feels a bit cardboard to me. One of the best bits for me was the sequence of paired diary entries from Das and Jack, showing their very different perspectives on 21st century humans and each other. Often very funny, and occasionally poignant, and while I don't think they'd have supported a full story in themselves, I would have been glad to see more of them.

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48) Justin Richards -- Doctor Who: The Deviant Strain

Fourth of the new series tie-in novels. This one has Rose and Captain Jack as the companions, in a story set in a remote Soviet naval base abandoned after the end of the Cold War. The nuclear submarines were simply abandoned to rot as the cheapest method of dealing with them, as were the people from the village that had been there since before the base was built. The last real link with an unheeding government is the research institute which still receives limited funding and supplies. At least until something very odd is spotted by a satellite, and a Russian Special Forces team is sent to investigate.

The Tardis crew show up as well, because Jack has unthinkingly answered an emergency beacon's signal. While there is some suspicion from the Russian group, this is because Nine's psychic paper ID has declared him to be from a rival agency, and Jack is considered to be the sort of Intelligence agent who wouldn't know a real fight if he saw it. The two groups manage to work together reasonably well in spite of the tensions, investigating a series of mysterious deaths that show all the hallmarks of a mythical monster.

Enjoyed this one a lot, and not just because it has Captain Jack (who does not get to be on the cover). There's a good science fantasy mystery here, with the Special Forces team being more than just foils to show off how clever the Doctor is.

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40) Jacqueline Rayner - Doctor Who: Winner Takes All

Third in the New Who novel line. Now this was a definite improvement over the previous title in the series. It's a revisit of the Last Starfighter scenario, but with some nasty twists, and not just the one you find in Ender's Game. Rose and Nine drop in to the Powell Estate to visit Jackie, and find that there's a new video game being promoted by people in porcupine costumes, using scratchcards given away with any purchase at local stores, no matter how small. Mickey is one of the people who's won a console, and as he explains, the console has only one game, but it's still good value, because it's so realistic, and complex enough to be a little different every time you play. Of course the Doctor can't resist showing off and beating Mickey's score, doing so thoroughly that he becomes number one on the aliens' list of useful humans to acquire.

The plot's interesting and the characterisations for Nine and Rose are good. But where the story really shines for me is in one of the one-off characters. Robert is a young teenager, complete with young teenage boy anxieties and fantasies, and his interior monologue is wince-inducingly realistic. He's someone a lot of fans will be able to identify with.

Enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. This one I'll probably re-read.


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31) Stephen Cole -- Doctor Who: The Monsters Inside

Second of the tie-ins published for the new series. Adequate but nothing special adventure for Nine and Rose, which I'd have probably enjoyed rather more had I read it on initial publication rather than after the monsters of the week had appeared several more times on tv. The Doctor and Rose are arrested and separated within a few minutes of landing on an alien planet -- which turns out to be part of a solar system devoted to a privatised prison system, where landing without authorisation is itself a crime carrying a heavy sentence. Rose is shipped to a borstal, the Doctor is incarcerated in a scientific labour camp for aliens. They proceed to try and escape and find each other, but along the way realise that they have more problems than mere escape to deal with.

It's a Who tie-in novel, with nothing much to either recommend or disrecommend it. The moralising about the prison system is heavy-handed even by Whoniverse standards, although not enough to put me off reading it. Not one I'm inclined to give permanent shelfspace.

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(Book 26 for 2010)

Fifth Torchwood tie-in novel, and the middle one of the trio released for the second season. This one has a couple of references which place it late in second season, but no spoilers, and you don't need to know anything but the basics about the universe to enjoy it.

Michael Bellini's a Cardiff dockhand, part of a workgang waiting to unload a ship late one night in 1953. A ship whose cargo includes a crate marked "Torchwood". A strange explosion leaves him in hospital, the only one of his mates to survive. But that's not the worst of his worries. There are the men who say they're from the union, but who are clearly government agents. They're not nearly as frightening as the men in black suits and bowler hats, who aren't men at all.

In the present day, a quiet Sunday in the Hub is interrupted by the intruder alarm. A young man has suddenly appeared in a locked room, and he's riddled with a strange form of radiation. It doesn't take long for the team to establish that he's a local boy, but out of time. Not so strange for Torchwood, but there's a twist -- they've all encountered Michael before. Owen was a junior doctor, learning the necessary art of forgetting about his patients at the end of the day. Tosh was a little girl in Japan. Gwen was on her first day with a new partner, and somehow feeling as if it was her first day in the police force. Ianto was in his second week at Canary Wharf, making friends with another recent starter called Lisa.

And Jack? Well, Jack's been with Torchwood a long, long time. His own encounter with Michael was out of hours, but he still knows something about Michael's first encounter with Torchwood, and the alien artefact that sent Michael leaping through time. And a few more things besides.

This is a beautifully constructed novel, which uses Michael's leaps back and forth through time to tell a solidly plotted story around Michael and the artefact, while giving some lovely backstory and characterisation for each of the main cast. Something I particularly liked is that we see the characters when they were younger, and in those scenes they feel like younger versions of themselves, before various things happened to them. There's also some good characterisation in the present-day scenes. The nature of the book means that all of the main cast get a good share of the word count.

This is my favourite of the novels so far. That's partly because it plays to things I like, but it's also because it's well written. And while the canonicity of the Whoniverse tie-in material is ambiguous, I think this one adds a little more depth to the Torchwood world, not just another monster-of-the-week story.

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This is a slightly unusual entry in the book log -- it's fanfic. But it's novel-length, and it's very good, and as far as I'm concerned it belongs in the book log.

A while back Sam Storyteller posted a Whoniverse short story about Jack Harkness, I Were The Heavens, Rating: PG for language, Summary: A sixteen-year-old boy from Boeshane is going to win the war. The Time Agency has a vested interest in children like him -- and so does the Admiral of the Fleet.

Now he's posted a novel-length story about what happened next. And it's set both just after that short story -- and just before Children of Earth. But this is no simple fix-it fic. This is a carefully crafted consideration of time paradoxes, and the potential for damaging your own past/future. It's difficult to discuss it in much detail without heading into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Jack Harkness's convoluted timeline gives a distant future Jack a pressing reason to pull Ianto Jones into the 51st century -- and it's nothing to do with saving Ianto from an untimely death in the 21st century. Jack not only barely remembers Ianto, but to preserve the timeline will have to put Ianto back where he got him from once the job is done...

You'll need to have at least some familiarity with the Torchwood universe to follow this story, but it's a fine example of how good fanfic can be in the right hands.

Your Face Is Turned -- part 1 of 9
Sam's description:
Rating: R (more sex than you can shake a dick -- a stick! I mean a stick! More sex than you can shake a stick at.)
Summary: Lo Boeshane has a promising career ahead of him as he enters his first year of Fleet Officer Training, but the war is still with him and life at Quantico Station can be difficult. Meanwhile, Ianto Jones is just trying to figure out why the Doctor kidnapped him to the fifty-first century and why Jack abandoned him at a school for the Fleet's military elite. He suspects it may have something to do with Lo, but his attempts to help the troubled young veteran may damage his own timestream beyond repair.