Some of the more recent books I've read...

Longest Day by Michael Collier (6/10)

This book is one of the more disappointing Doctor Who books to come out in a while; it was not something I could enjoy reading. The plot and most of the supporting characters did not engage me much at all; the book just wasn't terribly interesting to me.

On the positive side, both Sam and the Doctor were well characterized, the basic ideas of the book were interesting.

I don't really have much to say much about this, I didn't care for it, and I don't really want to write about it. That's probably the biggest indictment against the book...

Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman (9/10)

This book, however, I want to write about. The only post-"Dying Days" New Adventure I've read to date. I found this to be extremely enjoyable. Building on "The Also People", this has some interesting additions to this particular advanced culture; a different sort of decadent society than The Time Lords, and an interesting contrast is made between the two.

Benny works well as the central character of the novel here -- she works by herself for the same reason she worked as a companion for the Doctor. Of course, now she has companion-like characters accompanying her, and the Edwardian-era John Lafayette works remarkably well in that regard. He is a realistic character -- someone who both manages to survive the bizarre situations he finds himself in, but is also not someone who adjusts so easily that it is unbelievable.

Kate Orman was one of the authors to convince me to start reading Doctor Who books several years ago -- If other Benny books are this good, I may have to rethink my decision to not follow this line.

Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel (7.5/10)

At first, I was prepared to completely slaughter this book; I had reached Susan's first appearance in the novel and found it one of the most offensive pieces I'd seen in Doctor Who fiction: "One of the advantages of barely ageing was that she still had the body and desires of a human teenager."

In many ways, this is pretty much a "connect the dots" type of book -- the plot is straight forward and simple, no surprises at all. This isn't a surprising book -- so if you don't think you are going to like it, you probably won't. And I think there will also be many people who will like it.

I had pretty much the same reaction to this book as I did "War of the Daleks" -- there was little new in this novel, and no real surprises. If you didn't like "War", or any of John's past novels, it's unlikely that you will like this one either. It's not the Dalek story I would like to read -- a story with even fewer continuity references would be more along the lines of what I'm interested in. I watched the reconstruction of Power of the Daleks at roughly the same time as this, and I could only wish for a novel more like "Power"

This book was originally proposed as a Third Doctor novel, and in many ways, this feels like it would fit right in with Terry Nation's Third Doctor Dalek Stories. This isn't an absolutely terrible book -- if you can enjoy "Death to the Daleks", "Legacy" should be right up your alley. Just don't expect anything new or surprising.