Sunday 3 July 2016

Lethbridge-Stewart: Moon Blink

This is the first book in Season Two of the Lethbridge-Stewart series. After the events of the previous books Lethbridge-Stewart is becoming more experienced in dealing with alien threats and has a strong team to help him. Here he heads up to Edinburgh to prepare to lead a new unit, the Fifth Operational Corps (a prototype UNIT).


In London, Anne Travers gets a visit from an old friend who announces she has an alien baby from the moon in tow. Lethbridge-Stewart discovers there is a new drug on the streets called Moon Blink which seems to have actually come from the Moon. It's up to Anne, Bill Bishop and Lethbridge-Stewart if they can ever contact him, to protect the alien baby from being used and abused by both the US and the Soviets.

I had my concerns about the publisher choosing Sadie Miller as the author of this book. She is the daughter of Elisabeth Sladen, who played Doctor Who's most popular companion Sarah-Jane Smith. But it turns out that Sadie Miller is a fantastic author, perhaps the best this series has seen so far. I liked her style of writing and she manages to some fantastic details. This book really fits into the series excellently with references back to previous books and indeed into the Doctor Who universe- there are references to everything from The Ambassadors of Death right through to Victory of the Daleks.

I really liked the plot here as it manages to be original and very different from the previous books. Here we have good aliens and it's humans that are the villains. There's a fantastic section where Anne considers that this is more scary which I thought was one of the best moments of any Doctor Who novel I've ever read.

There are a few minor quibbles though. Even more so than some of the previous books, this focuses more on Anne than the title character. It worked well here though and I can totally understand why an author would choose to do this- Anne is more of an interesting character. The ending here is what let the story down a little- it got very exciting and then suddenly fizzled out.

I thought this was probably the best book of the series so far and a strong start to the second series. I hope Sadie Miller writes more books because with this as a debut I can only imagine how fantastic her later books might be.

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