Kramer had respectfully offered Lethbridge-Stewart the front passenger seat. She sat in the back with Sally and Owain, pointing out landmarks and catching up on the latest about the wedding plans and Sally’s new appointment to Edinburgh. Lethbridge-Stewart had to admit to himself that he was mildly pleased – at first – by Kramer’s deference. Then the driver somehow managed to slalom across four lanes of traffic, whipping into a taxi-only lane and braking with a screech of tires as he joined the long line of exhaust-belching vehicles headed for the Queensboro Bridge. Only then, removing both white-knuckled hands from where he’d planted them firmly on the dashboard – to keep from being thrown headlong into it – did Lethbridge-Stewart understand that Kramer had done him no favour at all in offering up the front seat.As previously mentioned, I'm returning to the Lethbridge-Stewart series of books published by Candy Jar, looking at the career of the Brigadier before he became the Brigadier. In a previous review I unfairly accused the author of this novel, Rick Cross, of being a pseudonym; in fact he's NASA's senior media writer in the Marshall Space Flight Centre, and this is his first novel.
And it's pretty good. Lieutenant Adrienne Kramer, who later in her own timeline appears in the early Eighth Doctor novel Vampire Science, is Lethbridge-Stewart's liaison in New York where there are basically Yeti in the Metro. But it's a bit more than Web of Fear transplanted to the Big Apple: Lethbridge-Stewart is travelling with his fiancee and nephew, the latter already having a strange connection with the Great Intelligence, and there's a time-travelled version of Professor Travers in the mix as well. Well-written, respectful of its source material and true to its setting; it's a little too closely linked to the first novel in this sequence, The Forgotten Son, to work entirely on its own, but apart from that a good read. You can get it here.
