Players combines the war settings of The War Games and Timewyrm:Exodus, the American detective of Blood Harvest and elements of The Eight Doctors. Throw in a few vampires, and all Terrance Dicks's obsessions would be satisfied. Despite this melange, it's nice to report that Players is a return to form after Terrance's hitherto disappointing work for the BBC.

Some of the motifs herein are familiar from The Five Doctors and perhaps Enlightenment, Unlike some novels in this series, though, Players is more than mere pastiche, and the primary motivation is an investigation of what might happen were history to be manipulated by dispassionate observers.

The end-of-the-century setting of the early chapters bears comparison with this month's other previous Doctor adventure Millennium Shock, but where that novel is virtually contemporary, the fin de siecle segment of Players takes place one hundred years ago - in South Africa during the Boer War. After that frenetic opening, Players looks likely to develop into a sequence of battle vignettes - and then, thankfully, doesn't, the locale eventually stablilising as 1930s England. Historical figures feature heavily - Winston Churchill is a leading character - and the novel considers the dangers of British society's ambivalent acceptance of Nazism just before the second world war.

Despite that serious theme, the book is fun rather than affecting, and as usual with Terrance the unadorned prose means it never gets boring. The base tone of late-era Saward is pretty well captured with some ripe lavatorial humour, although the two leads don't really display many of their usual characteristics. Ten pages into the novel, Terrance forces a change of costume for the Doctor - and does so again later on. Not a fan of that jacket, then?

I only have one serious reservation, and it's to do with attitude rather than writing - there are continual references to the involvement of "England" in the war. This is just about acceptable in reported speech, as some characters might not know any better. However, as a Scot, I can't condone the frequent assertion in Players that it was not Britain but "England" which "stood up to Hitler" sixty years ago...