NA #27 All-Consuming Fire

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.