This is a tricky one for me. I enjoyed the book itself - it started off by introducing a lot of disparate characters & settings, & seemed to take a long time to get anywhere, but then everything started connecting & slotting into place & I could see how cleverly plotted it actually was.
The problem for me was that it just didn’t seem like a Doctor Who book. Ace & especially the Doctor were so much darker here. Ace suddenly seemed a lot older, perhaps she’d been forced to grow up in the previous story, but it was also clear they’d been based at Allen Road for a while. I really found the Doctor’s explicit approval of all the violence completely out of character.
I liked the unexpected outcome for Vincent & Justine, but the bleak fate of Patrick didn’t sit right with me - I would have preferred at least his chip to have survived and been given to his best friend Brodie.
I was amused by the fact that the society was depicted as having all the futuristic technology on the one hand, but were still using floppy disks on the other - again dating the book firmly to the Nineties.
And one minor quibble - it had far too many typos for my liking - did the proofreader give up?