In line with the other recent novels, The Moon Cruise is a short book clocking in at 189 pages. The story sees the 15th Doctor and Belinda part way through his second season (the novel places the action after the story 'The Well' when the Doctor is still taking vindicator readings from various places in his attempt to get Belinda back to Earth).
Here they arrive on what the Doctor thinks is a deserted asteroid, but which is reality one of the service corridors for a fantastic space cruise experience named The Moon Cruise. The ship is owned and run by Marilyn Moon, a character inexplicably modelled on singer and actress Marilyn Monroe, and as the Doctor and Belinda soon discover, the ship and its crew and its modus operandi are not at all what they seem.
The workers are prisoners, serving out a sentence which rises with every minor infraction, and Belinda ends up taking the place of one of them. The Doctor has to rescue her and so joins forces with the worker she replaced, a green-haired girl named Jax, to infiltrate the upper levels of the ship and to find out the truth behind the whole setup. But there are robotic guards everywhere, and giant centipedes roaming the lower levels ...
The novel has quite a few welcome influences from Doctor Who. We have, of course, the other space cruise liner story, 'Voyage of the Damned' with its robotic angelic Hosts and an owner, Max Capricorn, who isn't exactly human himself. Then there's elements from 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy' with the robot clowns, and also 'The Long Game' where the humans down below are controlled by a mysterious entity on the upper floors, reached by a single lift. It feels like a Doctor Who story, which is great.
Jikiemi-Pearson blends all these ideas together well, and her writing flows nicely, bringing the reader quickly through the story. The idea that the robotic guards have human parts inside also brings to mind 'Frontios' where the Tractators used human body parts to power their mining machines, or, indeed 'The Girl in the Fireplace' where the Regency Clockwork Men used human parts to fix up the spaceship they were travelling in. One thing I wasn't quite sure about was why there were giant centipedes and ember-emitting fungus in the lower floors - there's some words about how they just grew and multiplied there, but this is just Belinda's assumption - but it all adds to the suspense and provides for some great action sequences.
Overall the story doesn't really feel like a 15th Doctor adventure though, and in some respects I could 'see' the same story being told in the same way with any of the incarnations of the Doctor being involved. It's an enjoyable and action packed book, and once it gets going, it just keeps on going ...
It's a diverting and enjoyable read and I had a lot of fun with it. A good way to pass an afternoon.
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