It showcases a returning enemy, thoughtfully alludes to a multitude of familiar stories and has the occasional sentence where sense and syntax seem to have been beaten into submission. So Divided Loyalties is just another Gary Russell book, then?

Well, no - it deserves more than such flippant dismissal. Trilogic in structure if not content, the middle third - an account of the Doctor's first encounter with the Toymaker on an early escape from Gallifrey - is enclosed by the story of the fifth Doctor's investigation of the reclusive civilisation on the planet Dymok. Interspersed with attractively ominous cut-aways depicting the Toymaker's ensnarement of his current slaves, the opening half of this is particularly engaging and surprisingly funny.

Most impressive of all is the portrayal of the multi-skilled team of companions which the Doctor himself acknowledged as such in Castrovalva, and the provision of some depth to their confrontational interaction. Adric - here the cheerful, cheeky kid of his original character profile - obviously enjoyed bouncing along in the slipstream of the unstoppable fourth Doctor, and is aware that things aren't going so well with that Doctor's newer, younger replacement. This notion is relentlessly, amusingly, and above all believably re-emphasised virtually every time we become privy to the boy's thoughts.

Too frequently, though, he and the other characters are distracted by the Toymaker in a manner which doesn't really progress the story, and those diversions are, in turn, too often achieved through employment of induced hallucinations rather than the games and toys one might expect from a villain so obsessed with amusement. And how times have changed regarding visiting Gallifreyan history; in these post-iconoclastic times - Parkin, Platt and Miles having kicked over the barriers - the only foreseeable grievance is one of boredom felt by those readers weary that similar terrain has been charted rather too often.

Personally, I wish Gary could have resisted the temptation to allude to the similarity between the main villain and another Gallifreyan. We all know that Michael Gough appeared in Doctor Who more than once - if such self-satisfied in-jokery was ever charming, it certainly isn't now.