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| By: | David Turner, Buckinghamshire, UK , United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 22 January 2017 |
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| Rating: |   6 |
Warlock has lots of good in it, but also lots of bad. It has quick ending and doesn't feel like a dw book however there are some good.
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 30 January 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
This novel is many things, some good, some bad. Andrew Cartmel has a better understanding of prose than most of the other writers in the New Adventures line. The style and tone are consistent throughout. Cartmel has chosen a gritty, hard-edged, criminal underworld milieu for the setting and characters, and never wavers from that plan. The bad is that Warlock is not a Doctor Who novel. The Doctor is hardly in it and he does almost nothing that affects the plot. Cartmel clearly wanted to write a certain kind of story, but perhaps decided that the only way it could be reliably published would be to slap a Doctor Who label onto it. Instead, the novel centers on Cartmel's character Creed McIlveen, an American narcotics cop of the bitter, self-destructive variety that we have seen so many times. He has a sad and lonely past after his beloved died, lives alone with his dog, and secretly wishes that each time he goes on a mission someone will kill him and end his misery. He is also far more intelligent and insightful than any other law-enforcement character. You know the type. Creed gets more pages than any other character in the novel. Another bad spot is that Cartmel has written The Doctor and friends as if this were Mission:Impossible or The Avengers. The Doctor and friends are simply there, as a team, going under cover, on a mission to unmask evil doers. Cartmel doesn't bother to explain how The Doctor and friends got there, why they are there, why The Doctor wants them to investigate the newest designer drug called Warlock. He simply sends Benny on an undercover mission and she does not protest at all. I do not like this idea of The Doctor and friends as a self-appointed team of investigators into criminal activity. The Doctor should stumble onto problems, not actively seek them out. The last bad thing is that, apart from The Doctor and friends and a side character named Julian, every one in this book is nasty, vicious, violent, and thoroughly awful. Cartmel spends far too much time on long scenes that have no point other than to convince the reader of how nasty, vicious, violent, and thoroughly awful they all are. It is very unpleasant reading.
