When Lord Woolcroft and his team break open the fabled Tomb of Artemis, which has been sealed for thousands of years, they are astonished by what they find inside... The Doctor and Amy have come to Smyrna in 1929 to investigate a mystery. The Doctor knows that something very bad happened there: something that caused a lot of people to die and an entire, magnificent temple to be found and then immediately lost again. But he doesn’t know what is picking off the archaeologists one by one, or how it is connected to the terrifying howling in the night. As he and Amy get closer to the terrible truth behind an ancient evil, he begins to wish he’d never found out...

Ancient bestial statues coming to life - again?

To be fair to author James Goss, it’s not his fault that this talking book has come out so soon after the similarly themed The Jade Pyramid. Originally planned for release on 08 April 2010 as the first audio book to feature the Eleventh Doctor, The Hounds of Artemis was subsequently rescheduled to 03 June, then delayed again to April 2011, and has now finally emerged from its tomb of postponement in May. The fact that Amy Pond passes a crack in a wall (a motif from the 2010 television series) makes it apparent how long this title has languished in scheduling hell before AudioGO finally released The Hounds.

Fortunately, the setting is quite different from that of The Jade Pyramid: an ancient Greek temple being excavated in 1929. Any thoughts of similarity to the opening scene of Pyramids of Mars are defused by the Doctor’s jokey reference to “the Scarman Institute”, which he claims to represent.

Once again (should I really say “again”, since this story was recorded first?) Matt Smith acts as narrator, though this time he is aided by a secondary voice - not Karen Gillan as one might have expected or hoped, but Clare Corbett, who previously supported Tom Baker in the Hornets’ Nest miniseries. Here she plays Helen Stapleton, a descendent of one of the archaeologists, who has inherited a diary penned by Pond, from which she reads extracts. The use of alternating narrators helps to keep the story lively, though the switching of perspectives can get confusing.

Amy is well characterised, by both Goss’s writing and Corbett’s reading. I can easily imagine Gillan’s Pond bemoaning the 1920s “undercrackers” that she is forced to wear. Another witty line is the Simpsons quote I used a few paragraphs ago. The depiction of the Doctor is less successful when performed by Corbett, sounding more like David Tennant than her co-reader Smith.

The end result makes for diverting enough listening. The new series range has yet to capture the multi-voice excitement of AudioGO’s Fourth Doctor releases, or much of Big Finish’s output, but The Hounds of Artemis is far from being a complete dog’s dinner.

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Richard McGinlay