BASIC PLOT
The Doctor, Ben and Polly team up with a group of ghost hunters and find themselves dealing with an invasion whose roots dig 40,000 years into the past.

DOCTOR
Second

COMPANIONS
Ben and Polly

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Cumbria, England, July 8th 1994, Baghdad, from where it is transported aboard the Cat People's ship.

PREPARATORY READING
None

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 13 "Extract from An Even Briefer History of Time by High Lord Rhukk" Lord Rhukk appeared in Legacy.

Pg 15 'I walked for ages and eventually found something marked "BATHROOM". It was a swimming pool!' The pool returns in Invasion of Time. The Doctor says he borrowed the plans from Claudius Caeser.

'I'd say, "Magnus, don't throw old bodies away like you would a suit.'" Magnus is the War Chief, from The War Games and Timewyrm: Exodus. He was one of the Doctor's old schoolfriends, as seen in Divided Loyalties. He's also mentioned in No Future and Goth Opera.

Pg 17 "'The fact is, the TARDIS is getting smaller. Entropy. The time and space traveller's greatest enemy' 'Is it a serious problem?' 'Oh, absolutely. If I regenerate again, it'll shrink again. By the time I reach my fourth incarnation I predict this room will be tiny - barely enough room to swing a cat.'" This is a reference to the way the console room got smaller over the years and entropy was a major concern in Logopolis.

Pg 33 "The Inferno, the nightclub where she had first met the Doctor on Thursday the thirteenth fof July 1966" The War Machines

Pg 34 "She had faced robotic war machines, bionic Daleks and Cybermen. But an honest-to-goodness monster was a new experience." The War Machines, Power of the Daleks and The Tenth Planet.

Pg 38 "The Felinetta are a widespread race of galactic scavengers, I think originally from the Lynx constellation. Like cats on Earth, they are split into many different races across the stars: the Lion-Men of Mongo, the Felinoids of Cait, the Cheetah People and their genetically engineered Kitlings, the mercenaries of Gin-Seng; even the Aegis have been known to use metanmorphic cats in their undercover missions. I wonder where your young Cat Person was from? Vedela, perhaps, or Capella? It could have been one of the Kzinti warriors, I suppose..." The Cheetah People and their Kitlings were in Survival. 'The Killer Cats of Gin-Seng' was the original story to close season 15, until it was decided too costly to film and replaced by The Invasion of Time (it would have seen 15,000 cats filling Wembley Stadium).

Pg 48 "'Not 1986 again,' he groaned. 'But at least it's warmer here than at the South Pole.'" The Tenth Planet. (With thanks to Tim Snelling.)

Pgs 78-79 "Daleks, Cybermen I can cope with. Even those smugglers in Cornwall" Power of the Daleks, The Tenth Planet, The Smugglers.

Pg 81 "It was the book's fault [...] made my mind wander back to my previous self." The Doctor namechecks Ian, Barbara, Susan, Vicki, Steven and Dodo.

Pg 87 "One day, I've always told myself, I'd buy myself a little house here. Somewhere to use as a home whenever I come to Earth. [...] Or was that Kent?" The Doctor's house on Allen Rd in Kent featured in a number of NAs, first in Cat's Cradle: Warhead. It was first introduced before that in a DWM comic strip by Andrew Cartmel, where it was revealed that the second Doctor had owned it. Originally, the house in Cumbria in this book was to have been that house and the Doctor would purchase it at the novel's conclusion, but this was dropped when Gary Russell decided to eliminate most of the continuity from the book.

Pg 123 "Of course - Daleks, Cybermen, why not giant cats?" Power of the Daleks and The Tenth Planet.

Pg 147 "'So, she is a vile sand-demon, an evil since the dawn of time.' Dok-Ter nodded. 'Put like that, yes. Nice turn of phrase by the way.'" is clearly a not-at-all-subtle foreshadowing of the Doctor's same use of said phrase in The Curse of Fenric.

Pg 193 "I could say I've been at the South Pole since 1986 if that would help." The Tenth Planet.

Pg 235 "Like the Z-Bomb at the South Pole?" The Tenth Planet.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
The Cat-People, The Euterpians

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS
None

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

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
The Cat-People, The Euterpians

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Deep space, 3978 BC (according to the prologue on page 1 - but there's a digit missing from the date) and AD 1994, The Braxiatel Collection 3978, England 1994, Australia 1994, Baghdad (the past), Australia 40,000 BC, the Cat-People's ship

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
This is Gary Russell's attempt to do a book that wasn't filled with continuity references - which is a brave attempt, but sadly it never comes together. The Cat People have no depth and the research is poor. The book also gets somewhat racist, with Indigenous Australians being described as "Aboriginals" (a derogatory term) in authorial voice (eg. pages 98 and 258). There's a nice attempt to flesh out Polly and it's a fun TARDIS crew, but that can't save it from being a rather dull book.