BASIC PLOT
The Doctor and Peri land on an isolated world, with immaculate gardens. The Doctor must pass through the vast gardens while evading the clutches of their fanatical gardeners, Peri gets trapped in the wild woods and an invasion looms.

DOCTOR
Sixth.

COMPANIONS
Peri.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Gardens in the red sector, Esselven Minor.

The Palace control room.

PREPARATORY READING
None. A character from The Ultimate Treasure reappears, but the continuity is minimal.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 24 "I've set the automatic fault locator to run a complete system check just in case." The fault locator was first seen in The Daleks and rarely outside the Hartnell era, although it's cropped up in quite a few novels.

Pg 39 "He'd worked hard over the last few years to recover his audience recognition rating after the Gelsandor treasure story had ended sodisastrously." The Ultimate Treasure.

Pg 202 "The wooded glade on the treasure planet of Gelsandor, Dynes lying on his back holding a hand to his thoroughly deserved bloody nose." The Ultimate Treasure.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Dexel Dynes and his DAVEs (cameras) appeared in The Ultimate Treasure.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Green-8 (a robot), Oralissa (a hologram), Kel, Nerla, Raz.

Glavis Judd.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

• On page 249 Peri talks about Bolwig's troupe as though she saw them, yet she wasn't present when the Doctor met them.

PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups]

• Bolwig's troupe are recreations so possibly Peri recognised the originals.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
The gardeners, robots who tend the gardens of the planet.

Fighting robots (page 187) who deal with defences.

Holographic projections include a sprite, Boots (a walking teddy bear), Luci Longlocks (a doll-like nanny for children) and various dog-like creatures.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Esselven Minor, a millennium ahead of Peri's time (according to page 209).

Esselven, concurrently, not counting the weird time effects.

The Valtor and the Stop Press (spaceships).

Zalcrossar (flashbacks, pgs 45, 81 and 219).

Deltor 5 (flashbacks, pg 122).

Gadron (flashbacks, pg 219).

Esselven and Office of Stellmedia, 500 years on.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
If you took every Christopher Bulis book ever written and somehow created the precise average of all of them and turned it into a novel... well, you'd be wasting your time, because he's already done it. Palace isn't a bad novel by any means and there's a lot to enjoy while you're reading it, but it's still resolutely pedestrian and its major plot twist was done better on Star Trek Voyager. That's got to be a bad sign, no matter which way you look at it.