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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 30 November 2025 |
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| Rating: |   6 |
I enjoyed other Paul Leonard DW novels I have read, so felt let down by this one. The story centers on Doctor 7 and crew investigating child vanishments at the end of WWI. There is an elaborate plot involving someone using teddy bears as transmat locators to whisk away children to fight a war on a far-off planet, after some nasty surgical brainwashing. I find three large problems with this novel. Problem 1: Yet again we have Doctor 7 and crew playing intergalactic Mission: Impossible, complete with costumes, false identities, improbably easy insertions into businesses, governments, and other institutions. I say it again - The Doctor is a tourist, not an agent. He stumbles upon trouble; he does not go looking for it. Problem 2: To get all the bits of Leonard's main idea tied together would require a much longer novel. Too many threads are left hanging. Too many rationales are rushed through without consideration for the necessary logic. Characters are brought in, raised in importance just by volume of narrative devoted to them, only to be killed off without particular consequence to the plot, and then forgotten. Problem 3: This novel, like so many in the New Adventures line, has a messy and unnecessarily violent ending, discounting the denouement.
Among the better aspects of the novel are that the references to other Doctor Who stories are minimal and not gratuitous. Leonard does a very good job of writing from teenager perspectives without using the usual teen clichés. The villain of the story is misguided rather than evil, thus adding some needed moral depth to the story.
It's not a bad read, just not a good one.
