Don't you (forget about me)...

There is a quiet village - in this case, Muirbridge in Scotland - where something odd is going on in the big house up the road, causing the curtains to twitch. This is a staple of a much wider range of fiction than just Doctor Who, of course, but it does seem to have become a more regular visitor to the fiction range in recent years, which is fine. Perhaps less pleasantly, it's difficult to work up much enthusiasm for a seventh Doctor and Ace book - and I like both of them. It's just that there's been such a plethora of fiction featuring this pair that it almost feels as if everything that can be said, has been.

But let's not take away from Mark Michalowski what he's achieved here - he almost makes these two seem fresh and exciting, even when using such trustworthy shticks of the era as the Doctor sending himself mail so he knows where to go and what to do. (Battlefield, anybody...?) And it might have been asking too much to have used any other set of regulars - for we are used to this pair in what, for want of a better phrase, we might call 'realistic' settings, and Relative Dementias is based on rather a sad premise. It's also one which most readers will be able to identify on some level, dealing as it does with the silly despair of forgetful old age. The social realism reintroduced to the franchise calls to mind Damaged Goods and Human Nature from the Virgin New Adventures range, and while Relative Dementias doesn't quite ascend to the heights of those two groundbreaking novels - partly due to intermittent purple technobabble which really doesn't belong in this type of story - one can hardly blame Michalowski for trying. And he doesn't miss out on emphasising both the tragic and the comic aspects of the various dementias detailed, and of the potential ramifications of curing them.

A qualified success, then. And bonus marks for setting it in Scotland without bagpipes, a kilt or a Loch Ness Monster to be seen.