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Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin
Sep 12, 2025 6:46 AM

Author:Terrance Dicks,Geoffrey Beevers

Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin

Geoffrey Beevers reads this exciting novelisation of a classic TV adventure for the Fourth Doctor.

The Doctor is suddenly summoned to Gallifrey, the home of the Time Lords, where his ghastly hallucinations of the President’s assassination seem to turn into reality. When the Doctor is arrested for the murder, a hideous, dark, cowled figure is gleefully watching in the shadows.

In a battle of minds, the Doctor faces renegade Time Lord the Master, inside a nightmare world created by his old enemy’s imagination. But the Master’s evil intentions go much further - he has a Doomsday Plan. It is up to the Doctor to prevent him from destroying Gallifrey and taking over the Universe!

Geoffrey Beevers, who played an incarnation of the Master in the BBC TV series, reads Terrance Dicks’s complete and unabridged novelisation, first published by Target Books in 1977.

Reviews

The Deadly Assassin marks another hit from a range that continues to reward the listener. These audiobooks are often like revisiting an old friend you've lost touch with, and are reminded of all the great qualities they possess.

—— Mark Wright , Doctor Who Magazine

An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future.

—— Marcus Field , Independent on Sunday

Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.

—— Lucy Scholes , Observer

Playful, witty and expansive... An exceptionally clever and exhilarating excursion through Caroline high society.

—— Nick Rennison , Sunday Times

A genre-defying debut novel... Vivid and vivacious – hats off to Eyre.

—— Sebastian Shakespeare , Tatler

Bold and wildly original, Viper Wine is an exuberantly witty play on the vanity and ghoulishness of the beauty industry, and a celebration of the unfading beauty of language... Hermione Eyre has injected new youth into the historical novel.

—— Frances Wilson , Evening Standard

Hermione Eyre’s bold and satisfying debut...offers up a potent mixture of baroque intricacy and gothic horror. Like Laurent Binet’s HHhHViper Wine tries to tease out the tensions that exist when telling history as fiction. Eyre’s novel is stylistically a world away from Binet’s, but shows some of the same playfulness in its reworking of historical sources… The stylistic brio and technical invention on show here is truly impressive…

—— John Gallagher , Sunday Telegraph

A wickedly funny parable of today's beauty industry... Descriptive brilliance and breathtaking cleverness.

—— Melissa Katsoulis , The Times

No account of [Van Dyck] has perhaps been so convincing as that in Viper Wine… As art history it’s deeply unorthodox – but as a postmodern portrait of a trend-setting painter in the midst of a comeback, it seems both thrillingly and entertainingly right.

—— Marcus Field , Independent on Sunday

Almost 400 years after Venetia Stanley's death, little has changed. As an allegory of our ageing-obsessed generation, [Viper Wine] is hard to argue with.

—— Sam Baker , Harper's Bazaar

Eyre has written a sumptuous, sensual tale of beauty and vanity; it's crying out for a TV adaptation.

—— Bookseller

Magical realism meets a seventeenth-century Portrait of a Marriage. To say it is dazzling would be a puritan understatement.

—— Tom Holland, author of 'Rubicon' and 'Persian Fire'

Persistently bizarre, fecund, technically inventive, funny – and oddly touching.

—— Jonathan Meades

Viper Wine richly evokes Elizabethan and Jacobean language and is alert to the plight of Catholics under Elizabeth I and King James, while at the same time putting a post-modernist spin on the tight and enthralling plot. I used to be dubious about alchemy and antiquarianism, but the wit and excitement of this first novel breathes new life into them.

—— Tom Paulin

[A] cornucopia of a novel.

—— Kathy Stevenson , Daily Mail

As funny as it is surreal.

—— India Ross , Financial Times

This funny and exciting novel takes a fresh look at life during the excitement and danger of the 17th century.

—— Catholic Herald

The language is beautiful, creating fantastic images with her descriptions.

—— Claire Snook , Bookmunch

Eyre’s prose is sensuous and rich… Her recreation of the period is persuasive and alluring.

—— Andrew Tong , Independent on Sunday

A pacy, cleverly postmodern historical novel... Viper Wine is a high-flying, high-concept mix that stylishly transmutes its wildly disparate elements into an assured, flamboyant gem.

—— Tina Jackson , Metro

A mad, psychedelic romp through some of history’s most fertile ground... The author’s voracious enthusiasm for eclectic, highly-researched detail is persistently entertaining, breathing new life into the genre of the historical novel. A real tonic.

—— Matilda Bathurst , Country Life

Clever, lively and playful... [An] impressive first novel.

—— Clarissa Burden , Tablet

A dazzling debut… Wickedly funny.

—— ELLE Decoration

This dazzling firework of a debut novel is a reminder of how inventive and original historical fiction can be.

—— Anna Carey , Irish Times

Eyre pulls off a notable trick in Viper Wine, not just by reconstructing her chosen period but rendering it permeable to intrusions from other ages… Playful moments…are made all the more striking by being woven unannounced into a meticulously luscious fantasia on a theme of English high life in the 1630s.

—— Michael Caine , Times Literary Supplement

The horrors of the beauty industry are taken apart with feline wit and the book will make you purr with pleasure.

—— Frances Wilson , New Statesman

The most richly fruited post-modern novel since Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherrys

—— Marcus Field , Independent

A bold, impressive debut

—— 4 stars , Daily Telegraph

As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved herself an author well worth watching out for

—— Susannah Perkins , Nudge

Profoundly moving

—— Country Life
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