The Scales of Injustice

• written by Gary Russell
• Review: Everything is not right in the world of UNIT. There are members of C-19 and the Glasshouse that are working independantly on secret projects. And get this...they're sinister projects!

  A young boy is off to visit his aunt in the tiny, seaside town of Smallmarshes. There is not much about to entertain a teenager, so he goes off and tries to find adventure on his own. The night passes, and dawn arrives, and the boy has not returned to his aunt's home. She reports him missing to the local police, who send out word to keep an eye open for the boy. A policewoman searches an abandoned house, locating the boy - jabbering to himself nonsensically. Now, some hours after this, she fails to return after her shift, so the rest of the constabulary begins to search for them both. When they find her, she is found crouching in a corner of the abandoned house, babbling meaningless words, and drawing pictures of bipedal reptile men all over the walls.

  So, of course the Doctor gets wind of this incident (as do the self-serving members of the Glasshouse) and heads down to Smallmarshes to contact the Silurians before the Brigadier hears about it and has them all gassed. And now Liz Shaw is getting anonymous letters telling her that someting is rotten in the ranks of C-19. Liz is told to meet with a Dutch reporter who is to share information about what has been discovered. A skeptical Liz goes against her better judgement, and the Official Secrets Act, to find out what is up. So Liz meets this Dutch Jana chick, who tells Liz that all the information she has uncovered is leading them to an island off the coast of England, called L'ithe, which is where they'll find the answers. Do you think this is a likely story?

  Meanwhile, the "dark forces" arrive in Smallmarshes and are there to try and eliminate the Doctor. So the guy they hire to do this dirty deed first loses track of the Doctor, then loses his bottle, deciding to just collect the money and tell them the Doctor is dead. Who's gonna notice that the Doctor is not really dead anyway? This allows the Doctor to end up in the Silurian base. Well, it's not just a Silurian base, it is a base filled with Silurian/Sea Devil hybrids who are flawed genetically, and they need ape (human) DNA to cure whatever ails them. I can't wait to hear what happens next!

  Now, two days later, the Brigadier finally gets the memo about the policewoman drawing cave paintings, and he jumps into action! But the Brig has a few problems, one marital, that he's dealing with. In fact, the divorce papers are sitting on his desk awaiting his signature, and ending his marrage. Oh, the life of a UNIT bigwig. All this aside, he grabs Benton and Yates and heads to Smallmarshes to get to the bottom of things!

  So now the usual questions: Will the Doctor save the Earth? Will the Brigadier find true love? Are Liz's answers on L'ithe? Is the Master involved? Answers? Yes-Yes-No-No.

  Well, I could go on. There are so many refrences to past events: Cybermen invasions, Tobias Vaughn, Autons, Coal Hill School 1963, the Great Intelligence, oh man, my mind is reeling with innumerable events in Who continuity! Some people might like this kind of book, but it can become tiring. I'm not a huge third Doctor fan, and this story was just forced, and not really that great. Contrived, even. Liz Shaw is used quite a bit, but hey, Liz who?! Who cares?! The Brig and his personal problems are a breath of fresh air, and it reiterates all the crap we learn in Who Killed Kennedy?. How a UNIT soldier has to keep everything secret from everyone they know, including family. All in all though, this book, with all its Glasshouse nonsense, and covert-ops whoop-de-do, is nothing more than a pale copy of the forementioned Kennedy, which was brilliant. I'm only giving this a 7 out of 10 rating. It seems my childhood desires to read about human/Cyber/Auton hybrids are almost certainly, if not totally, dead.

• Timeline: between Inferno and Terror of the Autons
• reviewed by Jeremy Benner

The Shadow of Weng-Chiang

• written by David A. McIntee
• Review:
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• written by Christopher Bulis
• Review:
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Speed of Flight

• written by Paul Leonard
• Review:
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The Plotters

• written by Gareth Roberts
• Review:
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Cold Fusion

• written by Lance Parkin
• Review:
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Burning Heart

• written by Dave Stone
• Review:
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A Device of Death

• written by Christopher Bulis
• Review:
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The Dark Path

• written by David A. McIntee
• Review: A modern-day Earth Federation ship arrives at a distant, isolated world known informally as the Darkheart to repatriate a long-lost colony dating back to the pre-Federation Imperial Earth government. And while the welcome mat is rolled out, the Darkheart colonists seem none to eager to leave their world - despite a recent rash of reported attacks carried out by an unknown "demon." The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in the midst of this increasingly uneasy situation, and the Doctor's suspicions that there are other time travelers nearby turn out to be correct - another member of the Doctor's own people is there, in a TARDIS of his own. It turns out to be a friend of the Doctor's from his academy days named Koschei, which assuages the Doctor's fear that his people have come to force him to go home. But something about Koschei's actions is troubling the Doctor even more, especially when the apparent death of Koschei's companion sends him down a very dark path indeed.

  I was reminded of this book, and came back to re-read it, after hearing the tantalizingly vague origin story for the Master woven into the Big Finish audio adventure Master, for The Dark Path gives us a completely different origin story - or, perhaps, more accurately, less of an origin story and more of a Where Everything Started To Go Wrong story - but even that may be a misnomer, for some of the internal dialogue for Koschei, especially the bits about how leaving a corpse about is something he considers sloppy work, clearly implies that he's already taken lives by this point.

  Author David McIntee gravitated toward the Master a great deal in his New Adventures and Missing Adventures novels, always introducing some fascinating new facet to the character's history, though here he may be reaching. For when we first see the Master, he goes by the name Koschei, and while he may be troubled, he's a seemingly benevolent renegade Time Lord (at least at first) whose attitudes are, on the surface, only a couple of shades darker than the Doctor's. That the second Doctor was chosen for this story is interesting and well-observed, for Patrick Troughton's Doctor was always more actively on the run from the authorities than William Hartnell's version of the character. Given the second Doctor's reaction to the threat of his own people catching up with him in The War Games (and, retroactively, in The Two Doctors), the Doctor is almost on an equal moral footing with the Master/Koschei in this story, a nice way to keep things in a grey area until bodies start piling up.

  McIntee's books usually seem to have a bit of a fatalistic component to them, but Dark Path draws most of its grimness from the inevitability of Koschei's transformation into the Master. Ultimately, whether or not the book succeeds is up to the individual reader's acceptance, or lack thereof, of the backstory McIntee builds for the Master, and the reason he gives for the defining moment in which Koschei becomes the Master. Character-wise, McIntee is spot-on for all of the regulars, and it's fascinating to envision Troughton and Delgado sparring in the mind's eye.

  The Dark Path was the penultimate Missing Adventures novel before Virgin surrendered the Doctor Who license back to BBC Books following the seeming success of the 1996 movie, but The Well-Mannered War seemed so light and fluffy in comparison that I've always thought Dark Path has the feel of being the last book in the series. And it wouldn't be a bad note to go out on.

• Timeline: between The Web of Fear and Fury From The Deep, and after Twilight Of The Gods
• reviewed by Earl Green