Book Of The Month: Prisoner Of The Daleks

A TARDIS malfunction sends The Doctor back before The Time War to a period in The Dalek War (which followed the Earth-Draconian unrest that the daleks engineered, with The Master's assistance, in the 25th Century).

He falls in with a rough and ready group of dalek-hunting mercenaries and gets drawn into a dalek plot to tap into a temporal anomaly (the Arkeon Threshold) and use it to overpower the Time Lords.

This is Doctor Who as a grim and gritty war story, and not the usual kid-friendly fair I associate with this current run of BBC Doctor Who novels.

There's some pretty nasty torture - even a slightly graphic torture of a dalek, which is brilliantly penned by Trevor Baxendale to evoke a sense of sympathy for the creature - and harrowing death scenes.

While not on the Tom Clancy or David Drake level of technophilia, Baxendale still manages to give tantalasing insights into such things as the structure of the dalek military and what defences go into their outer casing, while propelling his plot along with the broad scope of a Hollywood war movie.

All the characters - again, including the daleks - are well-developed and convincing, with the diverse personalities, all with their different motivations, of the bounty hunters The Doctor strikes up an uneasy alliance with being particularly intriguing.

It isn't long before we are as invested in their safety as The Doctor is, and feel his grief if anything happens to them - if they are a surly bunch of thuggish misfits for the most part.

I must confess though that I 'cheated' slightly with this book, in that I didn't actually read it but listened to a fantastic, unabridged reading by Nicholas Briggs (the voice of the daleks - and many other monsters - on the TV series, as well as one of the head honchos at Big Finish), who gave every single character a unique and distinctive voice and made it feel as though I was almost listening to one of Big Finish's full-cast plays.

And, of course, you know with Briggs you're going to get the definitive rendition of the daleks (much to the amusement of Rachel who could hear them screeching at me in my headphones), again with different tones for different daleks - but all delivered in that infamous, stark, grating, nightmare-inducing ring modulated voice.

If it wasn't for the retro-futuristic steampunk stylings of Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb, Prisoner Of The Daleks would be my unquestioned book of the year.