In humanity's 10th millennium the Crystal Bucephalus is a technological marvel: a restaurant that transports its elite patrons back in time and space so as to allow them to dine in the most culinarily famous places in history. When the head of the galaxy's main criminal syndicate is assassinated while eating there, the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough are wrenched from the past and accused as his murderers. As they are drawn into the investigation, they find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy involving the kidnapping of a religious leader, dueling temporal scientists, and the efforts of a megalomaniac to cheat death and take over the universe in one fell swoop.

I must confess that I approached this book with a degree of ambivalence, as the idea of reading a Doctor Who novel that was premised on a minor gimmick adapted from Douglas Adams wasn't appealing to me. Yet while the idea of time traveling diners is one that can seem excessively ridiculous, Craig Hinton uses it to build one of the most breathtakingly ambitious novels in the Virgin Missing Adventures series. Key to this is his integration of time travel into the plot, which instead of being employed simply to transport the Doctor and his companions to some exotic locale is used as the main driver of events. These unfold over the course of the book to reveal a story of impressive complexity, albeit one dependent on hiding key details until late in the book in order to maintain a sense of mystery. This is a minor complaint, though, when weighed against Hinton's success in providing a multilayered adventure that comes together in an exciting conclusion to rank as among the best Doctor Who novels that I have read so far. ( )

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I had been puzzling over the title of this Fifth Doctor novel since I first heard of it; what gadget could conceivably be made of crystal and also named for Alexander the Great's horse? As it transpires there is a double explanation: there is a crystal statue of the horse, which turns out to have extra powers, but also the statue is located in a restaurant named after it. Rather oddly the Doctor turns out to be the owner of both statue and restaurant. Lots of similarly wacky (or wackier) nomenclature in the book, not all of which completely gels, though enough does to keep one going; I loved the idea of the Lazarus Intent, a religion combining a garbled Christianity with the monsters of the Whoniverse, and am impressed that Hilton found something useful to do with Kamelion. ( )

Part of Virgin's Missing Adventures line, with the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, and Kamelion. I don't usually like Kamelion, but for once he was actually useful. Everyone else seemed like they could use a vacation. The plot, boiled down to its essentials: the TARDIS crew winds up in a restaurant whose premise is that patrons can be sent to any time period they want for a fantastic meal. Things go horribly wrong, the Doctor and his companions are separated, and everything gets complicated. Your typical Doctor Who story, in other words.

I found this book interesting, but occasionally something of a chore. Personally, I think Doctor Who gets a little tedious when they try to go into more technical/science-y detail about time travel, and Craig Hinton went a little nuts in that area. There was also a lot about how the TARDIS functions, which of course varies from author to author. I think a lot of the book was just overly complex. I think the Missing Adventures were mostly intended for adult hardcore fans, but I do have my limits. ( )