A Doctor Who novel featuring the Eighth Doctor, Sam Jones, and Fitz Kreiner. Sam disappears and the TARDIS is severely damaged after an encounter with a dimensional anomaly; the Doctor and Fitz get stuck in Sweden where there's been a rash of mysterious disappearances.

I didn't much care for this one as it's mostly just running from monsters and people shouting at each other. That sort of thing can work okay on screen, but reading nearly 300 pages of it gets old. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1798723.html

An imaginative combination of the elements which make up a Who story: the Tardis, with Eight, Sam and Fitz, lands in Sweden in 1999, but an unstable wormhole is allowing nasties from a dying dimension through, and the Doctor has to save the nice aliens before it is too late, with no help from UNIT. Well described, and the nice aliens have an interesting biology. Though I was sorry that the nice Swedish girl didn't get to go with the Tardis at the end. ( )

Sweden in July 1999. Six people have disappeared, as in "vanished, along with everything within a three-metre radius around them", in the woods outside Strängnäs. At the same time, an elderly farmer in the area has found and been forced to shoot a nightmarish, hyper-aggressive creature in his barn. Meanwhile, the Eighth Doctor and Fitz have been forced to make an emergency landing after some unknown phenomenon has damaged the TARDIS badly, and Sam is missing after a strange whirlpool of chaos swallowed her. The Doctor must try to find out what happened to the missing Swedes (one of whom comes back — briefly), where the alien insectoid things come from, and where Sam is, and whether all those things are linked; unfortunately, the TARDIS is damaged to the point of severing its telepathic link to him while it is recovering, and the resulting disorientation doesn't make things easier...

On the whole a lightweight but enjoyable novel, set partly in Sweden, partly in a pocket universe, and the only time we have seen the Doctor visit these parts. Walters seems to have read up a bit on Sweden, maybe even visited here; still, a few of the Swedish names are slightly strange (the village outside Strängnäs is called Härad, not Harad, and I suspect "Olla Wenberg" should be "Ulla Wennberg"). One thing that really makes me feel as if even the parts from Sweden are set in a parallel universe is the description of Swedish tabloids as less predatory than the British ones. The difference is one in degree only; Swedish tabloids are no less sensationalist (if, thankfully, slightly more reluctant to pass moral judgement — you won't see them calling anything "vile" in so many words). I'm just saying that if six people disappeared without a trace one summer, Aftonbladet wouldn't just "carry a short article on the 'Strängnäs incident', reporting the bare facts and listing the names of those who had vanished". (We are never told whether newspapers exist in the Dominion.) ( )