I've been surprisingly disappointed by the stories given Seven and so I'm pleasantly surprised by this one. The freaky cabaret singer and, of course the [REDACTED] make this one wonderfully creepy and vivid. ( )

Matthew Sweet wrote an earlier Doctor Who play, The Year of the Pig, which brought the Sixth Doctor face to face with Marcel Proust in Ostende. Thomas Mann doesn't make as overt an appearance in The Magic Mousetrap, but by mooring his story in Mann's Magic Mountain, Sweet has managed to take a lot of the things that tend to annoy me about Seventh Doctor plays - the Doctor as arch-manipulator, the pocket-universe-under-siege plots - and turned them into a rather good piece. The identity of the chief baddie came as a pleasant and well-executed surprise to me (I'd downloaded it without reading the blurb), and although it's a rather silly concept it is executed well. Recommended, but not for the novice fan.

The second CD also includes the first installment of The Three Companions, an ongoing series featuring Anneke Wills as Polly, Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and John Pickard as Thomas Brewster. Brewster is certainly my least favourite of the audio companions, but the other two are sheer delight, and I found I had something in my eye as Polly and the Brigadier exchanged notes on their time with the Doctor. ( )