Second paragraph of third chapter:

“That’s your considered scientific opinion, is it Fitz?’ the Doctor asked.

I had actually read this one twice before, in 2008 and again in 2015, but I came back to it again to round off the ongoing multiple worlds narrative of the Eighth Doctor Adventures that I have been slogging through. In my first attempt, in 2008, I wrote:

Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.

This time round, I felt that there was a decent bit of closure for the narrative, but in the end I still don’t have a strong sense of who and why Trix and Sabbath are in the series at all, and the twist at the end is a nice touch but doesn’t actually tie in with the rest of the story. But you can get Sometime Never… here.

Next in this sequence: Halflife, by Mark Michalowski.