Ship of Fools (Doctor Who New Adventures) [Mass Market Paperback]

Dave Stone (Author)

Book Description

Series: Doctor Who New Adventures | Publication Date: June 1997

When Krytell, the wealthy head of a hugely powerful interplanetary corporation, asks Benny to do an unofficial and somewhat shady job, the benefits are immediately apparent, or are they? On board a luxurious cruise-liner, wealthy fellow travelers begin dropping dead like flies.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Virgin Publishing (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0426205103
• ISBN-13: 978-0426205104
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,173,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Agatha Christie on acid, March 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Ship of Fools (Doctor Who New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)

When Benny gets kidnapped she's not exactly happy. When the man offers her a luxury cruise (in return for delivering some money) she decides to accept it. When murders start to happen on board, she decides to investigate them.
Dave Stone delivers another fine book, with plot, humor, and lots of intriguing characters.
The best, is of course Emil Dupont-who has a midget problem. Everything is of course done by midgets: murder, mayhem, archery....
Khaarli the Czhan is cool too.

3.0 out of 5 stars Ship of Stones, May 18, 2003

By 

Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ship of Fools (Doctor Who New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)

After a semester that was far more work-intensive that I had been expecting, my brain demanded something fun and relaxing. Scanning my vast piles of unread books, I searched for something suitable, my eyes finally coming upon the next Benny novel that I had yet to peruse. Looking at the author's name on the cover, I hesitated. Would this be the Dave Stone who wrote the entertaining and enjoyable THE SLOW EMPIRE, or would it be the turgid and self-indulgent Dave Stone who thrust HEART OF TARDIS onto an unsuspecting world? I decided to take a gamble.

Thankfully, I found SHIP OF FOOLS to be a fun and entertaining adventure that played to Dave Stone's strengths rather than falling back on his more annoying authorial habits. It's an insane murder-mystery; most of the action takes place on a single location. An infamous jewel thief (known only as "the Cat's Paw") and Benny are both onboard the same intergalactic starship. When passengers begin dying in a host of bizarre ways, it's up to Benny to drink as much as possible, and to solve the mystery, if she can get around to it. This would be the sort of thing that Agatha Christie would write if someone removed all of her blood and replaced it with LSD.

The various clichés and stereotypes that we expect from these sorts of whodunits are all brought out and lovingly mocked. The most amusing of these are the various "great detectives" who all happen to be onboard the ship, and will be very familiar to fans of mystery novels, television shows and movies. While some of the jokes seem to tire by the end, the majority are at least amusing. The pacing is fast enough so that even the jokes that fall with a clunk aren't dwelt upon for too long.

I found the mystery aspects of the story to be genuinely unpredictable. It's virtually impossible to figure out which diversions are actual clues, and which ones are just a result of the author being slightly mad. Expecting SHIP OF FOOLS to follow the conventions of the genre is a pointless task. I recommend just reading it as an entertaining adventure, and then being occasionally amused by the jaunts into the mystery story.

It's an odd, but enjoyable book that moves from over-the-top cartoon violence into occasional bleakness and then back again. But for all of Dave Stone's madness, the plot has method to it. It's not always quite as funny as it's trying to be, but it did get me to laugh out loud a couple of times. Recommended as a fluffy piece of fun with a solid enough center.