Review: Doctor Who: Books: Summer Falls and Other Stories

 

By “Amelia Williams”, “Melody Malone”, James Goss and Justin Richards

BBC Books, out now

The BBC’s three tie-in ebooks in dead tree form, together with a couple of intriguing extras…

Season seven of Doctor Who had various extras tied in to it, including the online previews (contained on the complete Series 7 Blu-ray/DVD set), and these three novellas.

Summer Falls is the story that Clara’s charges were reading in The Bells of Saint John, written by Amelia Williams (better known to us all as Amy Pond); The Angel’s Kiss is a prequel to The Angels Take Manhattan, penned by the private detective Melody Malone (better known to us all as River Song); Devil in the Smoke is a neat lead-in to the Christmas episode The Snowmen, the creation of Justin Richards (better known to us all as…er… Justin Richards, also the real writer of The Angel’s Kiss). Each has been separately reviewed on the site (click on the titles above to read the reviews), with Devil in the Smoke the strongest of them, capturing the dynamic between Vastra, Jenny and Strax neatly.

James Goss wrote Summer Falls, and also provides the introduction and epilogue to this volume, the first in character as Amy, with some clever links to The Name of the Doctor, the latter apparently from a feature on Mrs Williams that obliquely ties up a loose end between Day of the Moon and Let’s Kill Hitler – I won’t spoil it but, like the animated piece between Brian Williams and his grandson, it reinforces the idea that more things happened than we had time to see on screen.

As a sidestep to season 7, this has come at the right time as we prepare for The Day of the Doctor – whether the pieces will stand up in years to come once the intricacies of the Moffat years are firmly in the past is another matter.

Verdict: Some clever writing in and around the most recent series of Doctor Who. 7/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order Doctor Who: Summer Falls and Other Stories from Amazon.co.uk