August Books 3) Asylum, by Peter Darvill-Evans
A slightly odd Who novel, a bit out of joint with itself: the Fourth Doctor, travelling companionless, meets with Nyssa, years after she has left Terminus, and sets off to track down a time anomaly centred around Roger Bacon in the year 1278. Darvill-Evans (who of course was Rebecca Levene's boss at Virgin when they were publishing the New and Missing Adventures) has worked hard, perhaps a little too hard, at the medieval Oxford setting, and explains how and why in an interesting afterword to the book. It is a very good study of Nyssa as tragic heroine, a line taken also in a couple of the better Big Finish audios; the Doctor / Bacon exchanges are quite fun as well. But the plot is a thin compilation of Brother Cadfael and Inspector Morse, with a pinch of alien menace not very satisfactorily explained. Still, an interestingly different take on where a Who novel can go and a moderate success.
