Escape Velocity sees the end of the story-arc begun with The Ancestor Cell and The Burning. This arc proved to be a radical and original "back to the roots" for both the Doctor and the books themselves, wiping the slate - and the Doctors memory - clean. After we've followed the Doctor through the 20th Century, Escape Velocity has the job of bringing things back together - delivering at last the long awaited reunion of the Doctor and Fitz.

The book also introduces us to Anji Kapoor, a new companion to be. She's well portrayed and likeable, Her scepticism at her sci-fi fan boyfriends' belief in UFOs etc. plays nicely, if obviously, as she becomes embroiled in - well I never - a plot involving UFOs and alien abduction...

It's not a bad plot, and has an interesting take on the possibilities of private space flights in the not-too-distant future. The Fay'kon come across as a tad insipid, even in their warmonger flavour, and indeed the only thing that distinguishes them from any other military Doctor Who alien race is that they're not all single minded conquerors.

With my expectations high from the generally excellent books in the arc before it, Escape Velocity had a lot of work to do. The result was fairly anticlimactic. On the one hand, the Doctors reunion with Fitz could have brought his memory back all at once, blam... But then we would be back to the situation prior to the whole arc, and this seems rather pointless. So perhaps rightly, the book opts for a more gradual approach, and whilst this robs it of the cathartic meeting built up to in the rest of the arc, it allows the changes wrought by the recent books to carry on, and keeps the question of when and if the Doctor will remember his terrible past ticking over in the background.

The strangest choice however was surely the utterly bizarre switch in the pre-ordained meeting place - all through the arc the Doctor has been carrying a note saying that Fitz will meet him in St Louis, and yet this is inexplicably and rather unbelievably subverted in Escape Velocity, with a Time Travel trick that seems more Douglas Adams than anything else.

Overall though, a well crafted if unspectacular tale, only let down by its anticlimactic reunion and bland aliens.