The Resurrection Casket - Justin Richards

Justin Richard's The Resurrection Casket is the ninth in the New Series Doctor Who Adventure books.

This adventure takes place on Starfall, a world out on the edge, where smugglers and crooks hide in the gloomy shadows and modern technology refuses to work - which includes the TARDIS. The zeg is a huge field of Electro Magnetic Pulses that quite literally puts a dampner on the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor and Rose stranded, for the time being, on Starfall, where the only technology is steam-powered, not electrical.

The pioneers who used to be drawn to Starfall in the hope of making a fortune from the mines find there are easier pickings elsewhere, but a few still come for the romance of it, or for the old-fashioned organic mining. And a few more come in the hope of finding the lost treasure of Hamlek Glint, that pirate scourge of the spaceways - a privateer, adventurer and bandit. His ship the Buccaneer is somewhere lost in the zeg, abandoned by its band of cut-throat pirate robots who had already been sold for scrap when Glint finally decided to retire.

The Doctor and Rose offer to help Drel McCavity (who's not a local dentist) search for Glint's lost treasure, which includes the fabled Resurrection Casket, supposedly the key to eternal life. In return, the TARDIS will be taken out of the influence of the zeg, so that the Doctor and Rose can board her again. Unfortunately for them, not all of Glint's robots were scrapped - and they're determined to find the Resurrection Casket so that they can bring Glint back to life and persuade him to resume his old killing ways.

This is a fun book - Richards has done a good job of capturing the voices of Rose and David Tennant's 10th Doctor - and children will certainly enjoy the piratical theme - especially those children who are also fans of Captain Jack Sparrow and the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The Resurrection Casket is also available from Amazon.com, and as a 2-CD audio book, which is read by David Tennant and includes an interview with Justin Richards (running time 2:30).