The Thirteenth Doctor #21

'The Maze of Doom' (2020) from BBC Children's Books.

Top quality stuff this. These two David Solomons books have captured Thirteen and the Fam so exquisitely. I feel like I know more about them from these than all of the televised run really. Graham has a lot of great focus in this one here. Love all of his bus-related antics, and his care and protection for Ryan. Yaz and The Doctor have lovely chemistry once again as well.

Big fan of the Nimon. Having not seen the Tom Baker story, this is a great introduction to them. It's really cool to see a classic villain being brought back into the new series via the EU rather than the main show. The Grecian lore and even the Polichroniadis villains were very kinetically written.

Only thing I'll say is the little "left not right" message felt a bit wasted. I feel like we should have seen The Doctor make that phone call immediately after they were separated, but then the double-meaning would later reveal itself. Just a weird bit of bootstrapping there that didn't really work for me.

This has been my favorite 13th Doctor novel yet! While I was hesitant about the return of the Nimon, this proves to be a globetrotting adventure that feels authentic to the era while also developing these characters further than what we see on screen. Yaz, Ryan, and Graham all shine quite a bit in this book. Graham especially we spend a lot of time with, and we see him in his lowest points and his highest, given Ryan’s life is at  stake for the second half of the book. There are a few Thasmin moments between those two characters, which is very cute. The two antagonists are very hatable and easy to root against, though I’m unsure how I feel about their redemption at the end. The whole book just feels like this huge finale to the season 11B era of the show that we never got.

This was quite a fun and pleasant read. The whole reveal of it being the Nimons would've been effective were it not for the fact they were already name dropped three times earlier in the story so it really should've been obvious. It's quite authentic to Thirteen's era but much better written. It really does seem like all of Thirteen's best works are in literary format, hopefully it won't be long before Big Finish can add to some of her strongest works.