A FESTIVE offering ‘sort of’, from the pen of Dan Abnett, who is an accomplished writer of Who stories, from the comic strips in the monthly magazine, through Big Finish’s audio adventures, to original novels both for the Who series and Torchwood.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive to a Christmassy scene and are supposed to be at home in 2011; however, as usual the Doctor has miscalculated and they are on a planet some distance away in both time and space.

They meet the Morphans, who treat our intrepid team with suspicion – especially as recently, their livestock has been being killed and some of their number have mysteriously disappeared.

The planet they are on, they discover, is in the process of being terraformed for a future generation, but for some reason the winters have started becoming extremely cold – colder than was planned.

Trusting to his feelings, the Doctor suspects foul play and soon finds out that the machinery has been sabotaged.

More investigating ensues and eventually the Doctor comes up against another race who want to colonise the planet; his old adversaries, The Ice Warriors.

The Doctor must somehow save the Morphans from freezing and starving to death, whilst persuading the Ice Warriors to leave them in peace.

Unlike Michael Moorcock’s original novel from last year, Abnett’s book shows that he has a better grasp on the characters.

Not surprisingly, considering his experience at writing Doctor Who stories, his characterisations of The Doctor, Amy and Rory are accurate, and it is almost like watching an episode of the TV series.

There is the right amount of action, emotion and humour in the story to make it an easy and enjoyable read, and leaves us looking forward to more of the same.

Published in hard back by BBC Books on September 29th 2011.

ISBN: 978-1-849-90243-4