Doctor Who: The Cabinet of Light Book

Of all the great Doctor Who writers, Daniel O'Mahony gets talked about the least, perhaps because his output's so slender - two great novels during the first half of the wilderness years, then nothing. And both of those novels were strange and creepy affairs, not really the sort of thing that could feed into the teatime show, which may be delightfully eerie at times, but certainly has no place for historicals in which the past celebrity is de Sade. This, alas, is not quite on that level; it may not help that it's a backdoor pilot for Time Hunter, the spinoff in which even I have never been much interested, and we see a lot more of its star, time sensitive detective Honoré Lechasseur, than we do of the Doctor. Still, O'Mahony at least uses this as the basis for a story in which the leads mostly want to be the Doctor, or are mistaken by each other for him, while the (unspecified) Doctor operates in the margins, outclassing them all. Any longer and it would have been wearying; at 120 pages, it just about works.