Suddenly Falvi really believed it. That had to be the truth: the cult had staged everything. Blown each other away in a frenzy, and now they were ghosts stalking the landscape. Ghosts, at one with the winter. Cold and dead and white.
It is definetly a first novel (there's so many characters that each have their own story fragments that sort of weave together) and it's somewhat slow at the first half but once the ice creature arrives it's actually quite good. Some readers might not like that its basically a novel with the Doctor in it instead of a Doctor Who novel but I don't find that to be a problem (one of my favorite Fourth Doctor books, Managra, is basically that).