Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks
In Brief: 1920s Chicago, The Doctor and Ace join forces with Al Capone to fight vampires. Meanwhile Benny investigates a rustic planet in the side-universe of E-Space and meets a mysterious Time Lady...
Once upon a time having a Doctor Who story that mixed historical figures and monsters would have seemed bizarre and somewhat silly (with 1985's "Timelash" H.G.Wells/Aliens combo being the definitive example of why it's "a bad idea"). Of course now we live in a world where we've had the Doctor meet Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie *and* Winston Churchill so a plot mixing Al Capone and vampires seems more like modern Who than it did back in 1994. However that's about as close "modern" as anything in Blood Harvest comes since as a book written by Terrance "I created the Time Lords" Dicks things are decidedly retro. The Great Vampire, Time Lords, Romana and E-Space are all involved in the story, which means that this is definitely a book for someone who knows at least a little about Doctor Who history (you really need to have at least seen "State of Decay" and "The Five Doctors" to get much of what is going on).
Another big problem is that none of the non-regular characters (or even the plot itself) ends up being anything more than clichés ("You Dirty Rat"-spewing gangsters in Chicago and standard terrified villagers on the Vampire Planet in E-Space). Well except for Romana, but then it's hard to screw up writing Romana. However despite the novel being not very good, Mr.Dicks, with his decades of writing experience, knows how to craft a real page-turner. Even though the result isn't very good you JUST HAVE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (so the Doctor Who equivalent of Dan Brown perhaps). Another issue is that everything *really* falls apart at the end, with rather than the plot-lines based in Chicago and E-Space coming together everybody suddenly ends up on Gallifrey for a big non-climax/run-around.
But despite these annoyances the book is very enjoyable, but really as a guilty pleasure. Terrance really knows how to keep a reader's attention even if he's a bit on auto-pilot. Not much more to say really.
Addendum:
Somewhat clunkily Blood Harvest fits in with the first of the Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures books which centred around previous Doctors by having a couple of minor characters appear in both books. While I did read several of the MAs back in the day I was never overly impressed with them and gave up after a while. However they sold well enough that for the next 11 years there was a "Previous Doctor" book available every month or two (ironically ending just after the show came back in 2005 with a 7th-Doctor & Ace story).
All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane
In Brief: Doctor Who meets Sherlock Holmes. A mission from the Pope, a train journey across India, a distant world and a colleague of Cthulhu are involved.
All-Consuming Fire took me a while a little while to get through, but strangely was still a good read. Looking back at since I started this little New Adventures reading-project (over 6 months ago!) All-Consuming Fire has taken me the longest amount of time to get through. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1. I've had a busy couple of weeks. 2. The book is written as a pastiche (as in the style) of Sherlock Holmes books. While it wasn't difficult to read it meant that it really slowed down the pacing so I was tending to only get through a few pages a night.
And when I say that it's a pastiche I mean that Andy Lane actually wrote the book as it it were a "lost" Sherlock Holmes novel, from the point-of-view of Doctor Watson and complete with 19th-century attitudes and vernacular. Surprisingly this feat is pulled off *very* successfully, to the point where I was often reminded of the books I was forced to read in high-school English classes (Dickens, this means you!). But as I said this accurate aping meant that the book loses a certain amount of narrative thrust. It's more of a literary meander than a gallop.
But meanders can still be a fun read, especially considering that an experiment like this could have turned into a disaster. The first 100 (Holmes/Watson) pages are the best part of the book since we're almost completely in the fog-bound Victoriana of the Sherlock Holmes universe. However once the Doctor turns up in the book (and later Bernice, Ace is kept out of the story until towards the end) things move from the foggy London of Holmes world into something more recognisably Doctor Who with the alien world of Ry'leh.
And the Doctor doesn't *really* meet Sherlock Holmes since he's just the cover name Arthur Conan Doyle used to hide the investigator's real identity. Or so says the book.
All-Consuming Fire is another good outing for Benny, in particular the parts of the book that are excepts from her diary to contract with Watson's sections. It's starting to become amusing how many of the authors of the series have tried to work around the poor decision that was to keep "nu-Ace" in the Tardis and how they try to get her out of a story as much as possible. Not only is she annoying but with her utility belt of futuristic weapons she's become more akin to K9 who just shows up to blast things and say something stupid. It's no surprise that she's constantly given the sub-plots.
So yeah, All-Consuming Fire was a good read. While it wasn't the most exciting book in the series so far it was a nice change of page. The only down-sides are that once off of Earth Sherlock Holmes becomes a bit superfluous and that the book's ending is poor. I'd put the book as being the literary equivalent to the Agatha Christie TV-episode from 2008, entertaining but forgettable.
