I’ve finished 16 books since 1 April, and so far only got around to blogging two of them, plus there are a whole bunch of Big Finish audios old and new that I want to write up. Next Thursday is a day off work, so maybe that will help. But I suspect I’ll still be writing up my April reading in mid-May.

Anyway. My last two write-ups were somewhat cranky. This is not. In Return of the Living Dad, Orman (with input from Paul Cornell) brings back Bernice Summerfield, several books on from her departure as a regular character, and tracks down her father, who apparently escaped the future Dalek war in which she thought he had been killed, and has settled in England in 1983 where he is involved in a convoluted alien plot. I suspect non-fans wouldn’t get as much out of this, but I really liked both the fairly intricate plotting (involving a potential nuclear war), and what Orman does with the characters, taking most of the regulars (Seven, Chris, Roz, and Benny andd Jason) a little beyond where they had been before. Having said that, I see one reviewer complaining that nobody who wasn’t a rec.arts.sf.drwho reader in the early 1990s could possibly enjoy the book; I propose myself as a counterexample. There’s also some interesting treatment of the question of the Doctor’s true name – nothing inconsistent with new Who, but coming at it from a different direction. I have only 8 New Adventures to go, and I think I’ll miss them.