Keith Topping's "The King Of Terror" is a good book, but it is not without it's problems.
The Fifth Doctor with companions Tegan and Turlough head to Los Angeles at the request of the Brigadier who suspects that a multimedia company are up to no good. Through in a band of terrorists and the prophecies of Nostradamus and the result is a quality book.
The plot is very good, even if the powerful company threatening world safety is an idea oft used in Doctor Who novels. Topping begins the novel with a couple of UNIT members, Paytner and Barrington, who seem very uncharacteristic of a Doctor Who novel and are a welcome inclusion. Both characters have strong characterisation which makes both of them likeable.
The regular characters fair well mostly. The Brigadier is in top form, although his appearance doesn't seem long enough. Turlough has some nasty surprises in store for him and Tegan is as fiery as ever. The main problem is that Topping hasn't quite got the Fifth Doctor's character right. It's fine at the beginning of the book but somewhere around the middle the character starts to slip and this results in some uncharacteristic behaviour.
Overall, "The King Of Terror" is a good, solid novel. It's first hundred pages or so are fantastic and kept me reading well into the early hours of the morning. But the last hundred and fify pages aren't as good, and the lapse led to me loosing interest in the plot. That said, the plot is good with waring aliens being at the heart of events. It moves along quickly but I felt the ending was a bit of an anticlimax. "The King Of Terror" is a good book, but it's not as good as "The Hollow Men" which Topping co-wrote with Martin Day as it fails to maintain the quality of the first hundred pages.
