A pretty good story overall, and one of the finer Silurian adventures out there.  Scales of Injustice is a dense little thriller full of characters, conspiracies, and politics.  It very much feels like a beefed up and more graphic version of a Season 7 story, specifically Doctor Who and the Silurians.  It does the usual thing of showing Silurians both pushing for and against war, with humans being little better this time, but it adds in stuff with the Sea Devils and Myrka.

What stands out more in the story is how much of the human side of things we experience.  There's a whole series of departments and ministers working behind the scenes to adapt alien technology into human military might.  It's pretty compelling, although I will say the tone of this novel is all over the place.  One minute a whistle blower is being violently murdered in detail, the next Liz Shaw might be building peace through the Silurians through the power of science.  Individually, these components are all really good.  Liz really gets to shine here as a companion and carries a huge part of the novel's narrative.  She gets to be a scientist a bit, even if most of her time is spent navigating the political conspiracy.

The Brigadier gets a lot of depth with a look into his personal life but otherwise I found him really and weirdly cut off from the rest of the events of the novel.  He seems to spend more time on his burgeoning divorce than on the deadly events surrounding him.  The Doctor is his usual self.  Author Gary Russell has a strong sense for the Doctor's voice and it never felt like anything but him talking and moving through the story.  I liked this book more than I didn't, but parts were clunky or in retrospect quite unnecessary.  The main two villains seem to just run away at the end which was unsatisfying.

And there's something very ugly hiding in the tone of this novel.  Liz Shaw is kind of reaching the end of her time with the Doctor for this novel.  It's compelling stuff - she's a companion who never got to enjoy the benefits of travelling in space and time, but instead had to bear the brunt of the horrors and eccentricities that surround being with the Doctor with few benefits.  UNIT is clearly not that welcome to her because of her gender, and so for a lot of this story she's left feeling kind of bitter and isolated.  That's fine in the right context but I think it creates this uneasy dynamic with her and the Doctor.  It feels like she doesn't want to be here and given the violence inflicted on her and those around her, it kind of sucks to read.  I feel really bad for her and while this all goes a long way to inform her leaving the Doctor, it can be pretty rough to get through.  I do like this book and ultimately Liz's character does leave the Doctor in a warm place by the end of the novel, but getting to that point wasn't easy on my end.

So I definitely can say this is the first Virgin Book I've read that I unambiguously enjoyed, but the novel wasn't without its problems, either.  I'm glad I read it though, and it was neat to see a much more mature version of a Third Doctor era story.  If the tone were a little more coherent I think this could have been the perfect Doctor Who story.