I am of two minds with this one. On the one hand, this is very good scifi. The whole mystery was well set up, believable, and interesting. On the other hand, it's written in a dry fashion and the characters don't pop, including Sam and the Doctor. I don't think there was a single humorous scene or even exchange in the entire book. It's all very serious.

The Doctor and Sam find a weird and seemingly abandoned ship adrift in space. Two other ships also find this derelict: the Nimosian warship Indomitable and the Emindian cruise ship Cirrandaria. Not only do these two ships want to claim the derelict for themselves, but they also already have bad blood and any incident could ignite a war between them. The Doctor is unusually prepared to step into the situation, taking many steps to quickly establish himself as major player by pretending to be a Moderator for the Galactic Federation (with fake papers, of course). This is a story where the Doctor (TM) & the Companion (TM) are just cardboard cutouts of these characters. With only very minor dialogue changes, it could be Three and Jo. It could be Ten and Martha. It could be Thirteen and Yaz. You get my point. Still, the story was intriguing enough that I didn't mind it much. It's really a very solid and quite sad closed timeloop. If only it was a bit more dynamic in terms of characters.

Not much else to say this time. The Doctor uses his real name to get the crew of the Cirrandaria to trust him, but honestly, we have no reason to believe he gave them his actual name, and it's 'unpronounceable' anyways. Sam believes it, though. Once again the Doctor manages to not get seriously hurt (two books in a row! #safetyking). Sam gets turned into a little kid for all of 5 minutes, and is otherwise also unharmed. 

This book is, unfortunately, an 800 page ultra-hard SF novel forced painfully into the skin of a 300 page DW book from 1998. There are a lot of interesting ideas going on in here, and some strands of the plot I even found intriguing - especially Lester and Rhonda's terrible marriage. But even the lure of ghostly and possessed murder wasn't enough to save this one for me.

It was fine. As I say, it wanted to be a novel it was never going to be. There are way too many characters and it feels like the Doctor and Sam are barely there at all. And when they are, she's off getting kidnapped and he's standing about being enigmatic. Meanwhile, all the side characters are fighting this war I didn't care about on ships with ghosts that all get explained away with a portal in space and time.

Certainly not the worst EDA I've read so far, but definitely a solid average. A book I would have enjoyed way more had it been a *book*, not a DW book