So Vile A Sin
Summary: 7/10. At the end of the Earth Empire, the Doctor, Roz, and Chris follow up on their previous adventures. It's Roz and Chris's home time, and Roz ends up back with her family to meet her fate.
The story behind the creation of So Vile A Sin is well known amongst Who book fans, and as an example of what can happen without a solid back up strategy for valuable data. This gave the story a mystique that it might not have otherwise had, even though it does wrap up several plot threads from previous books. Of course, by doing so, So Vile A Sin is not a book for the casual DW Book fan. One might think that a novel co-written by Kate Orman and Ben Aaronovitch would be of major appeal to a general audience, but it isn't.
So Vile A Sin has its greatest strength in defining the late Earth Empire -- the time period that the New Adventures really took as their own and developed. With a wide variety of locations, I was able to visualize this universe, and see how it worked even more than in the third Doctor era.
(As an aside, I've found it interesting that the Third Doctor's era defined so much of what was built on in the New Adventures -- an expanded UNIT history, regular reappearances by the Silurians (renamed -- perhaps definitively -- as the Earth Reptiles), the Adjudicators expanded to be a major historical force (once the bit of Judge Dredd was added in), and the Earth Empire of "Colony in Space", "Frontier in Space", and "The Mutants" as a major setting of stories...)
As I haven't read all of the Psi-Powers arc, I couldn't really cue in on all of the references to N-Forms; I was thinking Ghosts of N-Space, which is never a good thing. Combined with the departure of a book companion, and the references to other past DW novels, make this a NA for NA fans -- if you are looking for a first DW book, this isn't the place to go.
I enjoyed So Vile A Sin, but it certainly wasn't the best novel by either of the two co-authors, who have done some of the best stories in the series.