"The Sands of Time", ultimately, proves to be a synthesis of Justin's first two novels, while attempting to take the author's plotting skills to a new level of complexity. "Sands" is one of a very few Doctor Who stories which plays with the nature of the timestream itself -- having the Doctor appear midway through events he has yet to instigate. This is not an easy thing to write with conviction, and will no doubt recall to the minds of many readers a similar ploy in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure". Ultimately, Justin's attempt is a decent, if not entirely successful one. The playing with time gifts the novel with a number of early shocks and surprises, but when Justin has to turn around and write the parts which will lead into the earlier chapters of the novel, the book starts to lose its sense of pacing. Despite the author's best efforts, then, much of the first half of the book proves monotonous and predictable, since the reader alreayd knows what's going to happen anyway. As events we already know are going to happen unfold, there's a real desire to just get past this part and get on with things, and unfortunately the novel becomes weighted down as a result.

Things do pick up again, though, in the second half of the book, when the action switches from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Apart from the more overt connections to "Pyramids of Mars" in the latter half of "Sands", the action also picks up and Justin is able to have some fun with the perceptions of the characters of places and objects they'd just seen -- a hundred years ago. The plot also picks up noticeably, weaving a progressively more tangled web as events rush towards their conclusion. The only downside to this is that it tends to force Justin to devise increasingly more complicated and vague -- and correspondingly less believable -- explanations for what's going on. This gives rise to a certain fear that not everything was planned out in advance, which would be a rather bad idea for a novel with this kind of narrative structure. Ultimately, however, Justin surpasses these difficulties to produce a thrilling and satisfying conclusion, well in the spirit of the adventure it follows up but also appreciable in its own right.

Interspersed between the chapters are brief interludes set across space and time, with a number of different characters. Some of these just look like stylistic filler, and are ultimately forgettable. Some -- particularly those alluding to the connection between Egyptian myth and the reality of the Osirans -- are truly fascinating items, and leave the reader pandering for more. And some, perhaps unfortunately, more or less give away the surprise revelation at the book's end for those willing to decipher the order of events well in advance. I'm not sure if Justin intended this or not; and some would no doubt see this as a good thing rather than a bad thing. I guess it's all up to personal taste.

The main characters -- really just the Doctor and Tegan since Nyssa is all but absent from beginning to end after being kidnapped by the chief villain -- are capably protrayed but not stunningly so. Certainly, there's none of the sense of character exploration present in "Dancing the Code" or "Downtime", for example. The supporting characters, sadly, are little more than ciphers, hurt badly by the fact that "Sands" is more or less evenly split into two distinct sections, with little character overlap. Only the butler Atkins and the main villain, Rassul, are present for the majority of the book, and neither rises above fairly standard personages. Atkins is enjoyable but largely uninteresting, serving his role in the novel well but hardly making an impression on the reader. Rassul is simply too elusive a character for the majority of the book, receiving any true depth only in the climactic scenes. It is this lack of a strong central villain which is the biggest difference between "Sands" and "Pyramids". Where "Pyramids" revolved around the outstanding Sutekh, "Sands" has no such equivalent.

An enjoyable novel and a worthy sequel to "Pyramids of Mars", "The Sands of Time" is the third successful Missing Adventure in a row, boding well for the rest of the series. Although flawed, its positive aspects manage to rise above these problems, allowing the reader to gloss over them easily. As the first of a number of sequels in the coming MAs, "Sands" gets things off to a very good start indeed.

8/10.

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