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Reviews for Blood Heat

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Worth reading. Ending not so good.

By:Virtual Vikki, Red Bluff, CA, USA
Date:Wednesday 7 August 2002
Rating:   10

This story is one of the more innovative of the series. It tends to lage a bit about 1/3 of the way into the book for a chapter or so. I don't want to give too much away, but the ending does negate the action and leave the reader a bit unsatisfied. however, the adventure of getting to the end is well worth the time spent.



All good

By:Whites, Southend, UK
Date:Tuesday 18 July 2006
Rating:   9

First time i had read a new adventures in years. Top quality and well worth the read. It's fascinating to read a parallel-universe take on what happened after "DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS" and i thought the Brig' was portrayed very well. If you're a fan of the UNIT stories i suggest you read this book. Immediatly.



Great, original, exciting, but the end!

By:Clive T Wright, St Lawrence, United Kingdom
Date:Tuesday 14 June 2011
Rating:   9

Have to say this is one of my favourites, I have a battered copy on a shelf, which I have read many times over the years.

An action packed, roller coaster, which tests the doctor, putting the brigader and ace in their element.

As with the other reviews, don't want to give anything away, but the build up to the end is great but the very end is a little disappointing.

Despite this I love 99% of it.



Expanded release

By:ross hamilton, basingstoke, United Kingdom
Date:Friday 29 January 2016
Rating:   10

Jim Mortimore is a genius! This book was already one of my all time favourites but the expanded edition, a really nice covered hardback is just amazing. I got my copy this Christmas and it brings so much more to the story. Bernice fans should definitely look into this, a definite 10/10. Plus Jim is a great guy who gets back to you and really takes on fans ideas and listens, can't wait for his next expanded adventure!



Good in General

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Saturday 4 November 2023
Rating:   7

"Blood Heat" is generally regarded as the best of the "second season" of Doctor Who novels. It does have much going for it. I will start, though, with what for me are problem areas. One is the continued portrayal of Ace as a single-minded, professional soldier, who is somehow still angry all the time and not for any good reason. This one-dimensional Ace is nowhere nearly as interesting as her younger self in the TV series and the early Big Finish audios (produced a few years after the Virgin run of Doctor Who novels). Another is that Mortimore indulges in too many drawn-out battle and fight scenes, described in just a bit too much gory detail. If realism is what he is aiming for, that is fine, but to have characters performing superhuman acts, such as Bernice's single-handed takeover of a nuclear submarine, undercuts the supposed realism injected by the detailed descriptions of all the ways to damage a human body. Further, the ending of the novel is a greatly rushed final battle sequence, and the resolution just magically "happens" because the novel has to end. Last, for this review anyway, is that because the novel is an alternate universe story, the reader gets to retread much old ground if the reader has seen the previous Doctor Who TV serials that this book builds on - "The Silurians," "The Sea Devils," and "Ghost Light" primarily, with a few smaller references to others. Something that may bother some readers is that this is the first novel in a five-novel "Alternate Universe" sequence that finds The Doctor being manipulated, forced to live through versions of history in which he did not win out or was not around to solve the problem. As such, the ending of this novel is a blank space. We know that The Doctor is being manipulated, but we do not know who is doing it or why.

Now, for the good parts. First, this novel is probably the best-written New Adventures novel up to this point. The novel has very little clunky dialogue. Mortimore avoids the many early-novel mistakes that clutter previous works in the New Adventures series. He gets down to telling the story, with straightforward plotting and a good sense of how to keep characters distinct and interesting. We are meeting characters we know from the past, but these are much different characters in many ways, shaped by entirely different circumstances. Mortimore does very well in making the characters both like their originals, yet different. He is especially good with Sergeant Benton in this regard. The story has about five different threads, and Mortimore does well in keeping them all going on the same general course. As an interrogation of "Doctor Who," and thus, necessarily, of The Doctor, this novel is better than most others. With the exception of Ace, the characterizations are all clear in setting up why characters take the ethical positions they do, and why they act as they do. Thus, "Blood Heat" has more positives than negatives and makes pretty good reading.

Final Note: Mortimore self-published a "writer's cut" version of this novel, substantially longer. I have not read it, so I do not know whether it counteracts some of the criticisms I have.



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