Several of my friends regularly watch/watched Dr Who and Torchwood. I managed to never get into Torchwood when it was on the air. I was familiar with the characters and concepts due to catching bits and pieces of the show or hearing friends discuss some point or other. I'm more of a reader than TV watcher, so I started reading this series as I was interested enough to see what it was all about. At first, I had assumed the novels would just retell the events from the TV show, but these are totally different stories. The books do occasionally touch on stuff that happened in the show as the events they portray sort of happen between episodes. After reading the first 12 novels in this series, I actually went back and watched the whole show, too, since I liked the characters so much. ( )

'Another Life' is another Torchwood book, set at the start of the first season. So I'm not going to say anything about parts where the characters's backstory departs from what's later revealed in Season 2. The plot is interesting and I like the alien's thing (I know that's vague but I'm trying to avoid spoiling things). Jack's eventual plan is very Jack and the character's are well done. Anglehedes's Owen is significantly nicer, or at least less cruel, than TV-Owen is, but some of the ways Owen describes things are very him.

A solid read and worth the time. ( )

This was pretty good. Slow in a few places. Well...maybe not slow but more technical. But that is Torchwood, so it's to be expected. I think the characterizations were pretty spot on; the way the characters interacted with one another was very much like on the show. The story was good and I'm looking forward to reading the next book. ( )

Cardiff is flooding and people are dying horribly and Owen is reconnecting with an old flame via a cross between Second Life and World of Warcraft. It was fun to see the old gang back together again, even back to before Rhys knows anything about Gwen's new job. If you like the early seasons of Torchwood, you'll like this little adventure, but like many books based on a TV program, it does not stand on its own. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1790286.html

I listened to the audio version of this, the first Torchwood novel, three years ago, and didn't quite get into it - John Barrowman's audio skills have come on a lot recently but he didn't really engage me in the story when I was listening to it. The dead trees version, however, had me gripped - lots of good Torchwood stuff, a body-hopping alien, a spaceship which endangers Cardiff, a former lover of one of the team (Owen in this case), all against a gloomy backdrop of awful weather littered with variously dead bodies. I tried this one as an experiment, but now I think I'll get through the entire sequence. ( )