http://nhw.livejournal.com/1018381.ht...

The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons, is an early one of the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures, set pretty firmly in TV chronology between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror, bringing the First Doctor with companions Ian, Susan and Barbara to the village of Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, just in time for the infamous witch trials.

Like Caroline Symcox's The Council of Nicæa, there is no sfnal element in the historical context apart from the Doctor and his companions, and thus it is very much rooted in the early traditions of the show, in a historical context where, essentially, the bad guys are the mainstream authority Christians and the listener/reader is invited to sympathise with the underdog.

Lyons makes the reader work hard; he has more characters to follow (not just four in the Tardis crew, but a large chunk of the population of Salem) and more background knowledge is assumed. He is also sticking closer to the historical sequence of events, though The Crucible is explicitly referenced, with the Doctor and crew taking in the first performance in Bristol in 1954, and the Doctor then returning with Rebecca Nurse to take it in again. Actually Lyons handles the possibility of changing history a bit less convincingly than Symcox, with even the Doctor rather un-Doctorishly seduced by the possibility of intervening to save lives. He also requires the Tardis to operate rather more accurately than we saw at this stage of the show's history. Balanced against this, there are a lot of pleasing references to the first few television stories. The narrative has its own drama, which carries the book in the end, but the Tardis crew rather end up with the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ( )