Birthright (novel)

Publisher's summary
I feel like a pawn in a blasted chess game, Ace.' 'I know what you mean. Trouble is, they keep changing the chess-players.

The TARDIS has died. Stranded in early twentieth-century London, Bernice can only stand and watch as it slowly disintegrates.

In the East End a series of grisly murders has been committed. Is this the work of the ghostly Springheel Jack or, as Bernice suspects something even more sinister?

In a tiny shop in Bloomsbury, the master of a grand order of sorcerers is nearing the end of a seven-hundred year quest for a fabled magic wand.

And on a barren world in the far-distant future the Queen of a dying race pleads for the help of an old hermit named Muldwych, while Ace leads a group of guerrillas in a desperate struggle against their alien oppressors.

These events are related. Perhaps the Doctor knows how. But the Doctor has gone away.

Characters

 * Ace
 * Gets stuck in 22,000.
 * Took a trip with the Doctor to Africa 'a long time ago'. The Charrl's hive resembles Termite mounds she saw there.
 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Gets stuck in 1909.
 * Can't read Cyrillic.
 * She gets the flu.
 * the Charrl
 * Queen Ch'tizz
 * Mikhail Vladimir Popov
 * Returns for a brief cameo in Happy Endings
 * Jared Khan
 * Born 700 years ago.
 * Margaret Waterfield
 * Is Edward Waterfield's sister.
 * Is murdered by Kahn's thugs.
 * Muldwych
 * Is most likely the 'Merlin' incarnation of the Doctor.
 * Got stranded on Antýkhon for 1000 years.

Continuity

 * This novel runs parallel with the events of NA: Iceberg, with the Doctor being absent for the majority of Birthright. This was the first "Doctor-lite" novel under the New Adventures banner (Target Books previously published two non-Doctor original novels, Harry Sullivan's War and Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma), and in some ways was a rehearsal for the later Doctor-less series of novels featuring Benny that began in 1996.


 * The Charrl and Muldwych make an appearance in NA: Happy Endings.


 * The Charrl are to said to have created the 300 (of the 700) wonders of the universe, first mentioned in DW: Death to the Daleks.


 * The Doctor also encountered a renamed future Earth in DW The Mysterious Planet.