Subject: Option Lock: Review by the Happy Guy From: "Sean Gaffney" Date: 1998/05/01 Message-ID: <01bd74ed$1fc4bc20$a980abcf@default> Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho [More Headers] [Subscribe to rec.arts.drwho] Sorry for the delay. I'm falling behind again... SPOILERS!!! Justin Richards is one of those authors I just enjoy. Good books, complex prose without being florid, crack research, and nice nice theatre refs. Option Lock isn't his best, but it's still a very good and satisfying read. PLOT: Did I mention complex? This is a political thriller, in the style of Tom Clancy, and that means lots of backdoor politics, doubletalk about deterrents, and the lot. Luckily, Justing was able to write this in a manner I could get my brain around. The alien menace was actually almost disappointing. I'd much have preferred this threat to be entirely human. THE DOCTOR: Fairly well done. Definitely seemed Paul McGann, and had an impulsiveness I found very refreshing. He seemed to be in the background for a great deal of this book. SAM: I keep waiting to be annoyed by her, but it's not happening yet. Maybe I'm reading the wrong books...anyway, Sam was perhaps my favorite part of the book. VERY well realised, gets quite a lot to do, some torrential angst... Nice. SILVER: The real villain of the piece. Yes, there were the Khameirians, but they didn't feel villainous to me. Silver was rather interesting, as he spent most of the book as a villain who was so over-the-top I almost winced. Yet there were little moments where the real Silver emerged, and those were done very nicely. Still, I saw a lot of Zaroff in him. OTHERS: Pickering nade less of an impact on me than I'd hoped, considering how much his death affects Sam. The Americans were very well done, especially Dering. The rest were pretty good. STYLE: Excellent. Reading Justin's books is like reading a graduate thesis at times, and I mean that in a good way. He always throws in a TON of research, that helps to make the book more real. The prose was very good, though I got a little bogged down about halfway through. OVERALL: Not a bad addition to the BBC books. I can't see it winning any polls, but it's still very good. 8/10. Next: Lovely Oblivion-type thing, where I decide NOT to try and talk like Sgloomi Po, because I can't do it to save my life... --Sean Gaffney --did I mention OL had *lots* of blood? It did.