20) Feast of the Drowned, by Stephen Cole

I’ve enjoyed two other New Series novels by Stephen Cole (here and here), so I’m glad to report now that I like Feast of the Drowned even more, which makes it the best Ninth or Tenth Doctor book I’ve read. It’s not that it has the literary depth that the best of the New / Missing / Past Doctor ranges have, but it’s very faithful to the spirit of Season Two (ie 2006, not 1964-5), and in particular it would fit awfully well into continuity between “New Earth” and “Tooth and Claw”; I found it easy to imagine what a TV version of this would have looked like.

We have here a return to Rose’s London; we have quite a lot of Mickey, and what he went through during the year that Rose had vanished – one of Mickey’s best outings in the canon (if this is canon). We have the Doctor being very David Tennant-ish, confusing friends and confounding foes, especially the military. As with the two other Cole books I’ve read, we also have shape-shifting aliens which share the Zygons’ aquatic habitat (but are otherwise original to him). Rose herself doesn’t come across terribly well, and the science is as bogus as anything else in New Who, but it is a very enjoyable romp.