Several of my friends regularly watch/watched Dr Who and Torchwood. I managed to never get into Torchwood when it was on the air. I was familiar with the characters and concepts due to catching bits and pieces of the show or hearing friends discuss some point or other. I'm more of a reader than TV watcher, so I started reading this series as I was interested enough to see what it was all about. At first, I had assumed the novels would just retell the events from the TV show, but these are totally different stories. The books do occasionally touch on stuff that happened in the show as the events they portray sort of happen between episodes. After reading the first 12 novels in this series, I actually went back and watched the whole show, too, since I liked the characters so much. ( )

Set very early in season 1 (before Cyberwoman from the way everyone is behaving), it is somewhat strange to read this novel now, after all the seasons of the series. Ianto is still only staying in the office and making coffee (pointed out in the same over the top way the first episodes of the series were doing it) and working security monitors and whatsnot around the office, Rhys still has no idea what Gwen is really doing. Except that here the team has another member - James - who seems to be part of the team even though we never saw him on TV.

And as expected with a Torchwood novel, the team is off and running against all kind of weird issues. However, there is also a big bad in town - except that this time it is not exactly a bad thing. The Rift is the boundary between worlds so it is kinda expected that other worlds will have some type of a Torchwood organization. And on the other side of the Rift in Cardiff are the Border Princes. But it cannot be straight forward of course, they cannot just come and say hello so while the team is running around trying to save everyone, the guys from the other dimension in turn help and then hinder them. Add a few weird technologies that make it into the wild at the same time (one of them managing to get to the heads of everyone on the team; another one being a war robot that has personality issues and really likes killing) and the picture is complete.

If I had read this book when it was published or at least before the second season of the show, it would have taken me a lot longer to figure out what is happening and why. But having watched "Adam" in the series, I was pretty sure this is where this is going. It was a nice read for what it was but unless if you really liked the series, it won't work - it relies on inner jokes and on the series to keep the characters three dimensional and even then, it is just too tied to the early versions of our guys (and those early versions were not exactly the best versions). ( )

This was good.

The thing I liked most was how well done the non-Torchwood characters were, because I worried about Mr. Dine and Shiznay and Davey Morgan. It's interesting and moves along at a fair click. Definitely recommended. ( )

This one is much, much better than the first novel based on the series. The writer captured Jack's voice and Owen's nagging, annoying self pride. Gwen is as annoying or fun depends on your liking of the character. Toshiko and Ianto are just scenery in this one as with the first book except for one tiny part for Ianto which is kinda of a replay of a scene late in the series involving Owen. I liked the plot of this one, the banter between the team. Made me want to pull out my disk and watch some Torchwood and Captain Jack. ( )

Excellent. I miss the show, but it's great getting to revisit the cast through the book series. And they are well written too. Sometimes the British terms are a little hard to understand, but for the most part the context makes it easy to figure out. ( )