I enjoyed this story, don't get me wrong, but it does have one plot point that is so absurd I have to comment.

According to records, 20 people have gone missing over the course of a decade. But that's an error because the column isn't summing properly.

Actually, people have been disappearing at a rate of one every two hours for a decade now. That's over 175,000 people.

Seriously, there are people in charge complicit in hiding the real number, but they have no idea the number is so big. Are we supposed to believe so many people have gone missing and nobody has raised concerns about how many of their friends and loved ones have gone?

175K workers have vanished and the people making the work rotas haven't noticed so many people not showing up?

While it's a cute idea, it relies entirely on treating people strictly as numbers and ignoring the fact that other people would notice the disappearances and act on their concerns.

I presume we're talking about, not just the introductory bit actually titled The Dead Men Diaries, but also all the linking material between the stories in the collection. Mostly, the material is perfunctory and honestly unnecessary. The stories could have been left to stand on their own. But these bits are entertaining enough and certainly harmless.

Silly but fun, a nice way to round out the collection, reminding us to not take Bernice too seriously, I suppose. Light and inconsequential, to be honest, but I enjoyed it.

Like the mud, this one sucked me in more and more as it went along. The conceit of the Professor giving a lecture and poor Gavin experiencing it as she sifts through his life, is pretty neat. A shame he didn't learn to lip-read sooner, huh? A very nicely paced story, and oh, how I laughed at the first thing Gavin said to Irene!

Typical Dave Stone. There's some pretty good story material in here, but as is his wont, the story is bloated, the narrative unfocused. He really does like to start a paragraph saying one thing and then drift off into side commentary like he got distracted by a butterfly or a shiny rock and forgot what he had started to say. This is saved, to an extent, by the fact that his diversions are often genuinely humorous, but it does make it challenging to stay engaged in the primary story.

Personally, I think the story would be better served with less of that, but I think fans of Dave Stone's style will enjoy themselves.

I was right there with it until the end. The story of Tony seeing Steven's ghost and of Viv seeing a different version of Steven's ghost is solid stuff, but throwing Jason in there at the climax didn't work for me. I think the story would have been better served by continuing to deal with Steven. And once it shifts away from the Tony/Viv/Steven story to a Benny/Jason one, it just ends, really. Not a word about getting people off the clock tower... It just really felt like the authors said "we're out of time, um...the end." That's how it felt to me, anyway. Pretty good for most of it, but in the last few pages it just seemed to want to forget the story it had been telling.

This one just felt forced. It's probably the short story format, but Benny falls madly in love (or in schoolgirl crush?) with a guy we don't invest any time in getting to know. Without any sense of what she sees in him, all her actions fall completely flat. Structure-wise the story is fine, at least.

A pleasant story, made so by the family of archaeologists. Pretty much simple and straightforward, my sense was that parts of it felt condensed, like the writing was trying to be minimalistic when I could have spent a bit more time saying what it had to say. Maybe not a whole novel to be had there, but it probably could have used a slightly higher page count to breathe a bit more.

After three stories in The Dead Men Diaries that I really enjoyed, this one just fell flat for me. At best it feels like it might be meant as a set-up for something to come later. Taken in isolation it felt like O'Mahony came up with some really cool visuals, tried to put them into prose, the end.

Sometimes you go to write a review and make the mistake of reading someone else's first. I think Megaminxwin pretty much said it. I've seen the "someone living in the film you're watching" idea before (not that I can say where exactly), but I really like the way it was handled here. I did have one disturbing thought, though - when they destroyed the piece of film by burning it - gosh, I really hope Mrrct'llz didn't feel like he was burning alive when they did that!

A lovely piece, and the writing really carries what in lesser hands could have been dull. But Kate Orman's hands are not lesser, and it shows here.

A nice choice to start the Dead Men Diaries anthology. The story is light, and doesn't get in the way of the primary objective - to set up Benny's character, and Braxiatel's too a bit. For my money, it does a great job of that.

This is a story that leans quite heavily on tropes, and still manages to be very enjoyable.

There's the trope of the prettiest girl in the village that everyone in town wants to marry, but she's fiercely independent and refuses all of them, but becomes quite fond of the hero. There's the feisty grandmother. The military leader who has to deal with an underling who, despite being lower in rank, holds power over him because he reports back to the leader's superiors and answers only to them. There are probably a few more timeworn cliches in here...

But for me it all worked. Apart perhaps for Moreno, the aforementioned underling who is pretty much a one-note character, the characters are well-drawn and quite engaging. Benton takes a lot of the spotlight as you'd expect, but we also spend a lot of time with Major Branwell and his counterpart Torres. Tracy also gets a fair amount of attention, dealing with the death of someone under his command.

As to the sci-fi elements, the introduction of the aliens works well, but I was honestly disappointed when we got into "attack of the zombie hordes" bit. That's a bit done to death, and I would have preferred to stick with just the aliens. Maybe without them the climactic battle wouldn't have had to go on quite so long...

The book isn't perfect, but it did keep me entertained throughout.

Now, I'm not a fan of Dave Stone's work to begin with, but I found this one basically unbearable. Felt like 15 pages of plot buried in a 105-page book.

If you've ever had a small child tell you a story, where they start to tell you something, then veer off on a tangent, then veer off again, and again, until you don't remember what they had started to tell you about, and you're not sure they'll ever stop talking because they're clearly not headed towards any end point...well, that's what it felt like to me.

Dave had an interesting idea, which he conveyed in the last few pages. The rest of it, well, it's just a confused mess until you get to the explanation, IMO, and to me, that's not a fun way to read a book.

It took me a lot of listens to get my head around this one, which was due to a combination of things, primarily being very distracted by work stress. Also I don't think there was enough variation in Frazer Hines' voices, so getting a sense of multiple characters being there was not easy. Finally, though I get the premise (at last), I don't think that premise works so well on audio.

The crew lands in Switzerland at some point in the future. I got no sense of Switzerland from the audio, it was just some city... Anyway, the city has two versions existing simultaneously, one where things have fallen to ruin, one where people haven't caved to despair. This is the result of some experiment, we find out at the end. The shifts between the two versions might have looked good on screen, but I never got much feel for it in the audio. The Hawkers, big metal birds that envelop people and turn box-shaped might look great onscreen, but conceptually they make no sense whatsoever, and what explanation we get for them is weak.

There's a mildly interesting idea here about the world you live in being the one you decide to live in, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

The first of two books, Intelligence Taskforce being the second one, United Nations draws on elements previously seen in the series, bringing in members of the Russian and American military and or intelligence community, setting up a situation that once again will require international cooperation to resolve.

There's nothing in this one that's actually about setting up UNIT, but there's certainly a good deal done to sow the seeds. Actually, whenever the subject is mentioned, it's clear that the idea is met with a ton of resistance.

The plot of this book itself revolves around people who affect the laws of probability. I know I've seen this idea used somewhere before, but darned if I can remember where. In any case, it's handled well here and makes for some really compelling action. This plot is not resolve in part one, but it does reach a good, logical stopping point, setting up the action to be picked up in another location in part two.

I like how Fiona is handled here too. It's a little tough, as we know enough about Alistair's life to know that their relationship won't last, so it's bittersweet to see how much good there is in their relationship.

If there's one downside to the book it's that the focus on the international elements means that we don't get so much time with the series regulars (other than Lethbridge-Stewart). A necessary evil for where this two-book journey needs to go.

In a way, this story really has the feel of a stage play. Mostly, it's a two-person script, with a smaller third role, which is not an uncommon construction. In that vein, the story works very well throughout the bulk of the audio.

It becomes clear fairly early that things are happening out of sequence, and Jamie is trying to work out the sequence. It's a bit vague how he knows he needs to work out a sequence, exactly, but that does not detract from the fun of trying to work things out.

For me, the story lets us down at the end. When Jamie works out the answer, I didn't find that particularly satisfying. And at the very end, the characters head off to...

It really, really feels like they're about to go into the next part of the story. Except there is no next part. I had this weird feeling like I was missing the second disc of the story. That came as a particular letdown as I had really been enjoying the story and I wanted to get what happens next.

So, a good story that ends rather suddenl--

A very basic Beauty and the Beast variant. I was all set to complain that there's no whiff of any Doctor Who connection, but then the Doctor himself actually shows up towards the end, mutters some technobabble and solves the problem. Not much to it, but this one does fit the remit (Doctor Who + fairy tale) better than most of the stories in the collection.

Well, I guess with "seven" as the common, um, denominator, Justin Richards could not resist welding together fairy tale dwarves with a Doctor Who stage play. The result is nonsensical. Some despot king gets someone to make a machine that will destroy everything. Why would he want that? Never explained. Why would the tradesman build such a machine? How would he know how? Why make it so that it only works with seven keys?

There's no sense behind any of that, but at least the king is poisoned and killed so later, an evil queen can decide she wants the keys so she can...do what? No idea, But Snow White has to stop her. Since the machine requires all seven keys to function, she finds one and destroys it. Oh, no, she doesn't do that. Instead she finds all seven keys, brings them to the room with the Doomsday Machine, and then attempts to destroy them. Really?

Fortunately when she breaks one key, it explodes and blows up...somehow not in her own face, but in the face of the evil queen who pushes her away just as she breaks the key, so that the queen is caught up in the explosion and no one else is harmed. That queen had some great timing.

If it sounds like I thought this was a terrible effort, well, yes. But at least it presents the life lesson that if your actions are dumb enough, everything will work out alright in the end.

But at least the title is fun.

Finally! One of the Time Lord Fairy Tales is all about the Time Lords! Well, okay, there are no Time Lords whatsoever in it, but it takes place on Gallifrey! Well, okay, in takes place in some forest on Gallifrey that is nowhere near any populated area, and could be any forest on any planet, but at least a couple of locations get name-dropped.

Based on the fairy tale Babes in the Wood, the skin is the same, but the babes don't die when they're covered with leaves. Honestly, I don't know what the reader is supposed to take from this story. Except maybe further proof that twins and Doctor Who do not a winning combination make.

One of the few Time Lord Fairy Tales to actually include the Doctor, this one actually has him center stage, and it is all the better for it. The Second Doctor as the Pied Piper, Cybermats in the role of the rats, heck the space station is even named Hamlyn. Just as unoriginal as the rest of the collection, this one actually feels like something they might have done in the show.

Some of the Time Lord Fairy Tales take a old story and do something different with it. Some don't, and all they really do is change the names and substitute a Doctor Who monster for the original. This is one of those.

Jack becomes Jak, the beanstalk is now a wormhole, and the Giant is replaced by Nimon. One major difference is that Jak gets to keep the cow! Rather than selling it for some magic beans, he stops on his way to market to help a dying man and gets money in exchange for the promise to destroy some unknown device. He can't figure out how to destroy it, so the wormhole does indeed open, but the story pretty much plays out the same otherwise.

Could be a fine bedtime story for a tot, I suppose.

I had to check where the material for this story was stolen, as it really did not jump out at me. The source is the Arabian Nights tale, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I can see that in retrospect, as the Slitheen ship contains barrels of jewels for no reason at all to do with the story except to tie in to the source. Andiba is not some greedy Ali Baba stealing any of these jewels.

Instead we get a story of some Slitheen wanting to mine a mineral, which unfortunately is located right under a town. A town that COMPLETELY COINCIDENTALLY has a factory that produces vinegar. Lots and lots of vinegar. Puh-lease. And if anyone can explain to me how it is that the Slitheen land on this planet, talk among themselves, and a local eavesdropper can understand what they're saying with no TARDIS translation matrix around, that would be great too.

Okay, well, aside from the unbelievably convenient setup of having the Slitheen go to a place that produces great quantities of the thing that can destroy them, the story is fine. Well, other than the last Slitheen being fooled into drinking vinegar by the most obvious ruse imaginable. At least the writing is decent, and Six One Three does sound vaguely like Sesame. And apparently, the going rate is 1 Slitheen = 10 Thieves, so I guess that's the lesson to be learned from this fairy tale.