"Sick Building"
by Paul Magrs

The TARDIS materialises in the snowy serenity of a forest, on a planet inhabited by a single family of humans - the Tiermanns. They live an isolated exisence in their Dreamhome, an iceberg-style construction built mainly below ground and equipped with a wide variety of robot "servo-furnishings", but risk losing everything with the approach of the devestating Voracious Craw.

Magrs's approach to the lead characters in the novel is brilliant. He seems to have identified and latched onto the Tenth Doctor's love of words, and incorporated it into the book as much as possible - the TARDIS is described as a "vworping brouhaha" and the Doctor is given lovely-sounding phrases like "mechanical chicanery" - the sheer fun the author is having with language really comes across.

It's not just the language, though: the Doctor and Martha behave on the page exactly as you'd expect them to on TV. Particularly well-captured is the Doctor's wide-eyed childlike excitement, with his character bounding hyperactively off the page.

The use of humour is also lovely - an action sequence, for example, is set to the sound of a sentient sun-bed and a vending-machine singing Bohemian Rhapsody. And the talking sun-bed threatening a beast with "a flash of the old ultra-violet" made me laugh out loud. For several minutes.

Admittedly, the plot is more than a little strange, but it's a mark of the story's success that this goes largely unnoticed. Magrs so engrosses the reader in the adventure that the fate of a motorised snack machine becomes of vital importance, and the existence of evil vacuum-cleaners seems perfectly plausible - it's only when you detach yourself and really think about it that you realise how mad this novel is. And isn't that fantastic?

With Sick Building, Magrs has managed to tone his style down enough for a family audience, without losing any of the charm, wit or outright madness that makes his Doctor Who books such a joy. It's unconventional, it's epic, and it's bizarre; but most importantly of all, it's by far the best New Series book published to date.