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"Saving the planet, watching over the Rift, preparing the human race for the twenty-first century Torchwood has been keeping Cardiff safe since the late 1800s. Small teams of heroes, working 24/7, encountering and containing the alien, the bizarre and the inexplicable. But Torchwood do not always see the effects of their actions. When an overlooked alien artefact despatches Jack Harkness into the past, how much of the twentieth century will he have to live through again? What links a three-year-old boy in 1994 to the destruction of a shopping centre in 2009? How does a witness to an alien s reprisals against Torchwood become caught up in a night of terror in a university library? And why should Gwen and Ianto s actions at a local publisher s have a cost for Torchwood more than half a century earlier? For Torchwood, the past will always catch up with them. And sometimes the future will catch up with the past "… (more)
User reviews
It's surprisingly successfully executed. Torchwood seems well suited to these shorter episodes; indeed several of the more successful novels have essentially been a framing story around a series of episodic events. One of the better decisions is varying the iterationsof the Torchwood team for stories - the opening story is a tale of early Torchwood, the second the team seen in the first two seasons and the more closely interlinked last three are the survivors of the second season finale. If I had one minor niggle, it'd be that a pre-Gwen story with Suzie Costello would've been more interesting to me than a straightforward first season team story. That's a minor concern though, the stories are all strong, from David Llewellyn's take on Torchwood as a Victorian X Files to Joe Lidster's typically, beautifully oblique finale. In between, Sarah Pinborough's Kaleidoscope is bittersweet and heartwrenching, Cartmel's The Wrong Hands straightforward but smart and James Moran's Virus probably the best Ianto story in any medium, a perfect balancing of comedy and thrills. A fine conclusion to the strongest set of Torchwood novels so far.