The Sixth Doctor returns, and he's thrown straight in at the deep end! Travelling the galaxy with Melanie Bush and their brand-new companion, marine biologist Hebe Harrison, there are wonders to see, dangers to face and plenty of peril beneath the waves. 1.1 The Rotting Deep by Jacqueline Rayner A mysterious SOS summons the Doctor and Mel to an oil rig in the North Sea where a dwindling group of survivors awaits rescue from a lethal menace. One of their number is Hebe Harrison, a wheelchair-using marine biologist who is definitely more than she seems. Can our heroes escape the rig? And just what is killing off the rig's beleaguered crew? 1.2 The Tides of the Moon by Joshua Pruett For Hebe's first trip in the TARDIS, the Doctor and Mel take her to the nearest available 'water world' – the Moon, two billion years in the past! Its advanced humanoid inhabitants, the Gilleans, are terrorised each night by their monstrous enemies, the Sheega. Even more worrying is that in a matter of hours, this ocean world will be laid waste by the gravitational interference of the blue-green planet next door. 1.3 Maelstrom by Jonathan Morris The Doctor, Mel and Hebe visit the archipelago world of Veludia, only to discover a planet beset by electromagnetic storms where three survivors traverse the seas in a ramshackle township. These survivors are 'corps' - bodies used as hosts for minds stored in the vessel’s ‘mind-drive’ - and the Doctor, Mel and Hebe are seen as welcome replacements. But there's something lurking in the waters below, something of rage and power that wishes to destroy them all: the Maelstrom!
Author
Jacqueline Rayner is a best selling British author, best known for her work with the licensed fiction based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Her first professional writing credit came when she adapted Paul Cornell's Virgin New Adventure novel Oh No It Isn't! for the audio format, the first release by Big Finish. (The novel featured the character of Bernice Summerfield and was part of a spin-off series from Doctor Who.) She went on to do five of the six Bernice Summerfield audio adaptations and further work for Big Finish before going to work for BBC Books on their Doctor Who lines. Her first novels came in 2001, with the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel EarthWorld for BBC Books and the Bernice Summerfield novel The Squire's Crystal for Big Finish. Rayner has written several other Doctor Who spin-offs and was also for a period the executive producer for the BBC on the Big Finish range of Doctor Who audio dramas. She has also contributed to the audio range as a writer. In all, her Doctor Who and related work (Bernice Summerfield stories), consists of five novels, a number of short stories and four original audio plays. Rayner has edited several anthologies of Doctor Who short stories, mainly for Big Finish, and done work for Doctor Who Magazine. Beyond Doctor Who, her work includes the children's television tie-in book Horses Like Blaze. With the start of the new television series of Doctor Who in 2005 and a shift in the BBC's Doctor Who related book output, Rayner has become, along with Justin Richards and Stephen Cole, one of the regular authors of the BBC's New Series Adventures. She has also abridged several of the books to be made into audiobooks. She was also a member of Doctor Who Magazine's original Time Team.
