Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee
In Brief: The Doctor, Fitz and Sam land in WW2 and encounter Nazis, Fairies and Rifts.
After a bit of a break I've jumped back on the 8DA band-wagon, I think the part of me that needs completeness ensured that sooner or later I'd start up with the books again. However I was a little concerned coming into Autumn Mist since I'd found the author's entries in the New Adventures to be some of the more *ahem* challenging entries in that series (First Frontier in particular took me ages to get through). While McIntee is very good at his historical research and detailed descriptions his characterization and plotting had been poor in the past, making for some of the least enjoyable of the New Adventures.
With these low expectations in mind I approached Autumn Mist with some trepidation. After having taken less time to get through the book than expected I have to say that over all the novel is surprisingly...average. It wasn't horrible and had a couple of actual good parts, but overall it was just very unmemorable and rather dull. Other than the regulars no other characters really stood out so long passages involving one bland soldier talking to another bland soldier were a bit rough. And while his descriptions of various tanks and hardware is good there's very little in terms of how anyone physically appears. It leads to the normal problem I've had with his writing that everyone sort of blurs together and figuring out who is doing what is extremely difficult.
The plot itself is rather slight, with the actual story not really starting until well after the half-way point. Normally I can cope with padding (this *is* Doctor Who after all) if it's at least *interesting* padding, but here we have too many chapters of The Doctor, Fitz and Sam being separated and joining up with various groups of Germans, Americans and English soldiers and various battles with the main mystery being the disappearance of bodies.
However I did appreciate the half-way mark of the book ending with Sam being fatally shot.
The resolution to her injuries (*spoiler* she doesn't die) has the novel shift away from the dreary first half into a somewhat whimsical tale of fairies from another dimension (who do you think has been taking the bodies?). Or perhaps it just gets silly. It turns out that the fairies have been stealing bodies to up their numbers since a large rift in space/time (are there any other kind?) has been damaging their dimension. While I wouldn't call the "Evil fairies vs. good fairies" sections particularly good at least there's more incident rather than the aimless wandering, being captured/escaping interspersed with descriptions of firearms.
Unfortunately the ending is very poor as The Doctor seals the rift through a technobabble method involving an air-craft character and the main baddy reveals that his big reason behind everything was...that he didn't have much else to do. All after a big battle-scene that turns out to be almost completely pointless.
But overall Autumn Mist isn't horrible, just not very good. And like much of the 8DA series I'm already forgetting it every happened...
