Wooden Heart is a fun, pacey read with a good central mystery, a satisfying conclusion and a well-characterised Doctor, Martha and guest cast.

The Doctor and Martha materialise aboard an abandoned prison space station. The initial chapters of them exploring this setting a depicted well so when they step through a door and find themselves in the middle of a forest, the sudden change of scenery is palpable.

The village of people they find in this forest are an intriguing group. The traumatic disappearance of their children, one at a time, night after night is a great mystery and adds another layer to what is a story that already has some good mysterious threads already. The danger would be that these different threads compete against each other but Day balances them well. The abandoned prison is more or less forgotten about but only until the Doctor later passes back into that reality, leaving Martha behind in the forest world. The forest world, its monsters and exactly how it comes to be in the middle of a space station is compelling enough to drive the narrative before the two worlds come back together.

The best character in the village is the wise woman, the Dazai. One of those characters familiar in Doctor Who stories, who sees more than she should rightly know, she has a fun dynamic with all the characters she meets, especially the Doctor.

There are some great set pieces too. Martha and two villagers, Petr and Saul's perilous journey across the lake to a forbidden island is exciting. The Doctor and Jude's (another villager's) revelations aboard the prison station are also entertaining. The villagers congregating for safety in the village hall, lit by candles and surrounded by a mysterious fog from which the forms of their missing children emerge.

Indeed, the whole theme of missing children is one which I always think affects me far more since becoming a parent to when I read similarly-themed stories before that life event. The fear that their child may be next is palpable in those scenes with the villagers.

I also really liked the jeopardy around the Doctor and Martha being trapped in the wooded world when it disappears because of how the Doctor deduces that it extends beyond the actual spaceship also adds a great tension to the story.

A slightly messy soap opera-esque plotline where Jude turns out to be the child of an affair manages not to detract to much from the story but it's not something the novel really needed as the mystery and two 'worlds' of the story are more than enough to maintain interest and create a satisfying conclusion.

This is the sort of story that would fit perfectly as a middle episode in the RTD era. Nothing groundbreaking but a solid, fun, well-paced adventure.