If 'Coldheart' has one fan, I am that fan. If it has no fans, I am dead. This book is solid. Good adventure, great use of the characters, interesting conflicts for everyone involved, and a good amount of humor. Crazy that after 'The Fall of Yquatine' I was saying that I wanted another 'Demontage'-like book, where the TARDIS team is mostly together, in a bread and butter DW adventure, and 'Coldheart' was right there waiting for me with open arms, saying 'I got you'. Trevor Baxendale also wrote 'Janus Conjunction', which I also quite enjoyed, but 'Coldheart' was even better; he does seem to have a thing for sand and for slime, huh?

The first 20 pages or so of this book are a complete delight. Full on, non-stop TARDIS team banter; I think we haven't had so much interaction between the three of them since 'Frontier Worlds'. The Doctor and Fitz ganging up with jokes so bad Compassion wanted to kill them. The Doctor and Compassion ganging up and making smart deductions about their surroundings, Fitz wanting to kill them for showing off. The Doctor falling down a hole, Fitz falling in after him (like in 'Dominion'!) with the great exchange of 'Thought I'd just drop in'/'I knew you'd say that'. Just great stuff, I had to stop myself from highlighting everything. The rest of the book continues on this tone, with the Doctor and Fitz wistfully dreaming of tea, Fitz's 'I've never thought of you as a woman' to Compassion, Compassion wondering if the Doctor is just 'some kind of Gallifreyan freak', and so many more.

Compassion's feelings about not being human anymore are explored more here. She goes on a very interesting tangent after she tries and fails to save a guy's life: she wouldn't have tried, wouldn't have cared, before the transformation. I like that she's confused, and that she's not sure how much of what she thinks and feels is really her and how much is the TARDIS's (and the Doctor's) influence. She thinks about how she can see the same thing in Fitz; how traveling with the Doctor is making him more empathetic, more willing to Do The Right Thing, even at some personal cost. In a strange scifi way, the TARDIS is both Fitz's and Compassion's mother, at this point. She made them: Fitz by restoring him from the Remote, and Compassion by turning her into a TARDIS as well. And then, in an even stranger sense, the Doctor is their father, via his telepathic connection to the TARDIS. Craaaazy to think about this. On top of that, Compassion's feelings about her new found imperviousness and immortality were very interesting to read. Is not being able to die the same as being dead already? This ends up bringing her closer to the Doctor in the sense that he, too, is almost immortal and almost indestructible; the keyword, as Compassion herself notes, is 'almost'. Fitz notices that the Doctor seems to be getting a bit too careless of late, putting himself in unnecessary danger. He considers that maybe he's doing all that to avoid thinking about what has happened: his TARDIS is dead, Compassion was turned into one against her will, and they're in grave danger as runaways from Gallifrey. Not to mention the War, and how he must feel about having to go against Romana, who was his friend. Damn.

I can't remember if the Doctor was ever in this many fistfights before; this book has a lot of action. In true Eighth Doctor fashion, he gets horribly shot in the arm with a crossbow and generally banged about throughout the story. He's written wonderfully. He hypnotizes one man to get information (which is rude, but l always enjoy it when he has to use underhanded tactics for the greater good), and hypnotizes Fitz out of a hangover. He tries to talk rather than fight at every point, but fights when he has to, and tries to save as many people as possible. He's not too soft, though: Tor Grymna uses up all his chances to stop being a dick, and gets eaten by a slug? "Bon appetit", and he's right to say it. Plus, he has several very funny lines, and several very inspiring and deep lines. What more could you want from the Doctor?

One thing I thought the book did really well was to have the Doctor deal mostly with the huge secret alien threat that will destroy the planet while Fitz was dealing with the societal part of things, especially concerning the slimers, Ckeho (whose name I shall never forget, since it is repeated about 5 million times) and Florence. The Doctor, of course, understands the motivations behind the slimers' attacks on the ice mine. He doesn't want to fight them, but he has to stop them from potentially killing the whole city and releasing the ancient giant monster slug in the underground. Fitz is having a less violent time, but is appalled at the treatment the slimers and Florence get. He was a wonderful line where he tells one of the Eskoni that he thinks he's a 'fascist pig and your opinions suck'. The unfairness of it all really gets to him, as they're saving all these people, but their society frankly sucks, even if some individuals are apparently good. The Doctor's answer is that now these people will get another chance to be better, with their help. He'll do the 'easy thing' and fight the monster, and Fitz will make them see the errors of their ways. The Doctor even asks if Fitz wants to stay and keep helping these people to build a better society, but at this point we all know he's not leaving; the camel people can deal with their own problems.

They come out of this story as a better team then they are at the beginning, which is, if nothing else, a great merit of this book. Compassion in particular goes through a little journey of accepting that they're in it together. Well, not accepting, exactly. She chooses that, chooses to keep them with her, to keep traveling as they do, meaning that they will always try to help the people they encounter. Whether her compassion (ha!) is born from herself of from the transformation, who cares? It's there now, she feels it now, and she needs the Doctor and Fitz with her if she wants to help people as she travels. As for Fitz, he's saying things like 'He's the Doctor. And believe me, he's the best', and worrying about him constantly. If it was ever in question since 'Interference' (remembering how Fitz was questioning of his role as companion in 'Frontier Worlds'), he is now really cemented as the Doctor's best friend, ride-or-die companion.

I could frankly keep going. There's a lot to enjoy here. Good book!

Eight goes through it once more! I'm 98% sure that being hit by that amount of water falling from such a height would have vaporized a person before drowning would even become a problem, but I'm glad Baxendale didn't realise that.

Memory Loss:1.5 (in 'The Eight Doctors', maybe 'The Blue Angel')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:14 (gets vampired 'Vampire Science', nearly drowns in the Thames in 'The Bodysnatchers', bomb+fingers broken in 'Kursaal', electrocuted in 'Longest Day', gets shot + severe blood loss in 'Legacy of the Daleks', nearly squashed by giant hydra in 'The Scarlet Empress', leg broken + slapped around by giant tentacled monster in 'The Face-Eater', stabbed 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds', gas alien attack in 'The Fall of Yquatine', beat up + shot with a crossbow + hit by tonnes of ice cold water here)
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')