Full of Eastern promise

Justin Richards - the editor of the BBC's range of Doctor Who books - was recently heard to muse that sometimes it's okay for a novel to comprise rather unimpressive prose, if the story itself is interesting enough. One might almost imagine the first draft of Bullet Time was sitting half-read on his desk as he said this - because Bullet Time is wilful, unadulterated pulp. Not for McIntee the aspirational literature of Parkin, Miles or Orman; Bullet Time is an airport bookstore paperback, a piece of escapism to be read, enjoyed and discarded at the end of one's journey. Essentially it's a tale not unlike some of Virgin's New Adventures in approach, dealing with high-tech warfare and espionage, incorporating Chinese Triad gangs to provide distinctive flavouring, and with a suspicion of alien infiltration allowing for the involvement of UNIT and Sarah Jane Smith.

Sarah? With the seventh Doctor? Yes indeed, and although - as I've criticised McIntee's work for in the past - this isn't pulled off without there being a residual odour of gimmickry, it's a post-UNIT and post-Doctor Sarah, in standard "investigative journalist" mode. Coming so soon after a similar unlikely collision of Doctor and companion in Asylum, this could have been a lot more irritating than it is here - the relative scarcity of the Doctor's appearances here probably help, as does the fact that we're now accustomed to Sarah in this role.

The book's not without problems - it's very bitty, for one thing, jumping around between rather too many short scenes as though it were a movie novelisation rather than a novel. And, as I alluded to earlier, the actual writing is unattractive. Some of McIntee's early work was outrageously over-written, and while he has thankfully moved away from that in recent years, many of the sentences herein seem a tad hamfisted, as though they hasn't been properly read back over. Nevertheless, rather that than tortuous purple prose, especially in such a relatively - and refreshingly - unpretentious adventure story.