Having recorded my disappointment with The Banquo Legacy, another Eighth Doctor Adventure just a few books earlier in the sequence which shares an author and a vague country house theme with The Burning, I felt that this time Justin Richards got it right; we have a well-realised late Victorian industrial/mining setting, a blasted heath, an alien presence which tempts gullible locals with promises of mineral wealth and military power, and some complex family relations among friends and foe. (Even some Biblical references, which is rare for Who.) The audio Industrial Evolution had a similar setting in some ways, but this is better. My only doubt is about the Doctor's amnesia - not an immediate fan of that storyline - but there is so much else happening here that one can let it go, and indeed perhaps it makes the book more accessible for non-Who fans.
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