Next in my series of reviews on the Doctor Who new adventure novels is the fourth, "The Deviant Strain" by Justin Richards.
**Blurb** (from the back of the book)
The Novrosk Peninsula: the Soviet naval base has been abandoned, the nuclear submarines are rusting and rotting. Cold, isolated, forgotten.
Until the Russian Special Forces arrive - and discover that the Doctor and his companions are here too. But there is something else in Novrosk. Something that predates even the stone circle on the cliff top. Something that is at last waking, hunting, killing...
Can the Doctor and his friends stay alive long enough to learn the truth? With time running out, they must discover who is really responsible for the Deviant Strain...
**Plot** (minor spoilers)
The book opens strongly, with a mysterious passage about a boy who has died. We then see into the TARDIS, where our favourite crew members - the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack - are responding to a distress call. Then the scene
cuts to army troops discussing some emergency, and I started to think "Oh dear..."
The military talk goes on for about two pages, and it had really started to bore me, so I was worried that the rest of the book was going to be the same. I was wrong - after this stumbling prologue, the book picks up pace and becomes very good indeed.
We start off with a mystery: a dead body, which seems to have had the bones and innards sucked out of it, and an unconscious young woman, who has the face of a ninety-year-old. The setting is a long-forgotten township near an old naval base, and a scientific research institute nearby. The Doctor, Rose and Jack make it their task to find out what has done this, because it is not the first time it's happened. They join the military troop sent to the area to investigate odd power surges, and have subsequently got caught up in the mystery.
At first it seems like the culprit may be an old legend - a vampire. But after Rose visits an old man in the village who can see the future, and then goes back to the local policewoman's house, it's clear that the real threat is a lot more sinister, and a lot more real. Whilst Rose is dealing with the sinister woman who ought to be dead, Captain Jack is on the trail of some blue blobby things down by the docks, along with some troops from the military. The Doctor is back at the scientific research centre, doing tests on a scraping from one of the mysterious glass stones near to where the murdered boy was found, and then exhuming a body.
All of these threads come together in the thrilling last half of the book, which is non-stop action and drama. I don't want to put too much here for fear of spoiling the book, but the highlights include an abandoned spaceship with rotting half-human/half-monkey corpses, a fire that damages nearly all of the village and a siege in the research institute where a dark secret is uncovered...
Even though we know the Doctor, Rose and Jack survive, there is a real sense of urgency in this book that makes you doubt that for just a moment. Unlike 'The Clockwise Man', the first novel by Richards for this series, the pacing here is just right and every page advances the plot. There's a very creepy feeling to the plot, and I think it would scare younger readers. There are also some rather gruesome images - for example the corpses of the half human/half monkey experiments. The big reveal - the reason why everything is happening is interesting and (if you take into account alien technology), quite plausible.
**Characters**
A big plus for me was that this book had Captain Jack Harkness in it, as he is one of my favourite Doctor Who characters. He gets a fair amount of page time here, and we do see a softer side to him that has perhaps not been seen on screen. He's characterised pretty well, and there are moments that are just pure Jack - where he flirts with anything with legs!
The Doctor in this book is very well realised, and you can really picture Chris Eccleston saying the things the Doctor says. Rose, whilst not having very much dialogue or interaction with the Doctor, is also well characterised and definitely recognisable from the series.
The background characters however are quite interchangeable. There are several soldiers - who even now I couldn't tell you their names, that all seem to have the same personality. Then there are a group of scientists at the research institute, again - interchangeable.
The bad guys are, for most of the book, big blue blobs, and so there's not much to say about them.
Once I'd got past the clunky start, I really enjoyed this book. The plot is fast-paced and thrilling, with a creepy element. Though it is set in present day, the general feel of the novel is that we've gone back into the past, which really shows the isolatedness of the community featured in the book. Adding Captain Jack into the mix is a great move - he's a wonderful character. All in all, a good read!
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The Novrosk Peninsula: the Soviet naval base has been abandoned the nuclear submarines ... more
are rusting and rotting - Cold isolated forgotten. Until the Russian Special Forces arrive - and discover that the Doctor and his companions are here too. But the...
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