We're doomed...

1999 seems to be quite the Doctor's favourite year - he can't stop coming back for more. In this, Keith Topping's first solo Doctor Who novel, that year's much heralded ethos of predestination is used to provide a sombre backdrop to the opening chapters which seem to promise a simple investigation into industrial espionage in Los Angeles. But with UNIT involved, the values at risk must be wider in scope than the merely multinational...

With a truly enormous cast of supporting characters, The King of Terror isn't the easiest novel to follow. So much time is spent introducing yet more subsidiary protagonists that in the middle third of the story, there isn't an awful lot actually happening. In some other respects, the novel recalls the work of David McIntee - from the spy-thriller overtones, through the convincing depiction of hardened machismo right down to the intermittently infuriating in-jokes. And once the introductions are finally out of the way, the Doctor begins to resemble his normally pro-active self, and the earthly concerns of terrorism and a threat of nuclear war develop into a story of alien infiltration of Earth society - which nevertheless never loses its political overtones.

The tone slowly and pleasingly mutates from machismo to empathy, mirroring the changes undergone by several of the leads, who stop deriding "touchy-feely" notions when forced to confront their own discomfiting emotions. Characters coping with personal tragedy is thus a dominant theme and an affecting one, but by no means the only one - and perhaps that's why the novel isn't completely successful. The writer may have been a little too ambitious, and has swamped the central story somewhat under a tide of secondary characters and subplots. In a first solo work that might be understandable 'first album syndrome' - The King of Terror seems to contain the accumulated ideas of a lifetime, not all of which get the space they deserve, the underused bunch of anarchist malcontents being the most obvious example. Maybe in his next novel Topping will give his characters (and his readers) a bit more breathing space...