[cross posting from my goodreads]

This was a lot of fun! The kind of story that we could probably never get in the show given how blood is involved.

The Doctor was fantastic, the vampires were fantastic, and while I didn’t looove them, the side characters felt realistic and i was invested in them. Nice to finally get to know Sam (her introduction in the first book was not really an introduction)! This book states she has been travelling with the Doctor for a while already. Gotta say, I would have preferred to have actually seen her first adventures to get a better feeling for her character before seeing her in this nasty and very traumatising experience. As it is, I kinda feel like I got to see her development, but without really having a firm grasp on where she was developing *from*, if that makes sense.

I’m coming from having already listened to many Big Finish dramas with Eight, so I have him very well defined in my head already. I was afraid his book characterisation would be too different, but I was delighted to see that it works perfectly. I could clearly hear every line of his in Paul McGann’s voice (it makes sense, of course, considering the audios come way after the novels were published, but I was afraid there would be a big disconnect). No idea if this holds going forward, though.