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Book Review


Book Cover

Torchwood
Skypoint (Hardback)

 

Author: Phil Ford
BBC Books
RRP: £6.99, US $11.99, Cdn $14.99
ISBN-13: 978 1 846 07575 9
Available 02 October 2008


SkyPoint is the latest high-rise addition to the ever-developing Cardiff skyline. It's the most high-tech, avant-garde apartment block in the city. And it's where Rhys Williams is hoping to find a new home for himself and Gwen. When Torchwood discover that residents have been going missing from the tower block, one of the team gets her dream assignment. Soon, SkyPoint's latest newly married tenants are moving in. And Toshiko Sato finally gets to make a home with Owen Harper. Then something comes out of the wall...

Skypoint is the eighth published Torchwood novel in the BBC hardback range and is written by Phil Ford. Ford has an extensive CV in television writing having penned work for the New Captain Scarlet, The Sarah Jane Adventures as well as Coronation Street, The Bill and the Torchwood episode Something Borrowed.

The book has a lot of things which will please fans of the show. Set only two weeks after Gwen's wedding, Toshiko and Owen are still alive - well at least one of them is. Owen is still coming to terms with being one of the walking dead. Also a lot of the romantic tensions between the two characters is played out in the book. Although Jack, Gwen and to a smaller extent Ianto all get a look in this is the unrequited lovers tale.

At two hundred and fifty pages, the story boils down to your basic haunted house scenario, though told with some wit and a writing style that keeps things chugging along at a pace that seems never overly rushed. The only big disappointment was the monster, which never really went anywhere. Ford has made good use of the high tech Skypoint as a setting, allowing for a lot of in jokes which will be understood by people of a certain age and fans of disaster movies.

Ford has captured the vocal intonations of the characters very well, including their mannerisms and has kept the sexual content down to a minimum, which is thankfully only alluded to which means that the book is suitable for a teen audience.

So it’s a good tie-in book which won't change your life but will while away a couple of hours of your time.

6

Charles Packer

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