Amazon suggested that I might like Andrew Mayne’s The Monster in the Mist: A Chronological Man Adventure, and at $0.99 I decided to give it a try. And if I had to describe it in one phrase, that phrase would be “Steampunk Dr. Who”.

The book is set in Boston, in the 1890. It’s been very foggy recently, and people have been vanishing in the fog. Meanwhile, the pretty and competent April Malone has for the past two years been holding down a very strange job. Every day she goes to an unmarked building and lets herself in. Once inside she makes a pot of coffee that no one ever drinks and provides a bag of pastries that no one ever eats. She gets pneumatic tubes containing punched cards that she feeds to her desk, and reads newspapers and academic journals. Sometimes she gets a typewritten letter from one “Mr. S” directing her to take some particular class or hear some particular lecture or learn some particular skill. The why of all this has never been explained to her, but the money is good, and she tries to do her best.

There is a metal door with three lights over it in one wall of the office. She doesn’t know what’s behind it; her predecessor in the position told her that if she ever needs to know, she’ll receive instructions at that time.

One day the lights light up, and out comes Smith. He drinks the coffee, eats the pastries, and wants to know what year it is. Then he looks at some punched cards from the desk, and he and April Malone are off to investigate the recent string of disappearances.

I know nothing about the author or the series other than what I gleaned from reading the book, so what follows is conjectural. But gosh, it reads like Dr. Who fan fiction. Smith is clearly a normal human being, not a “time lord”, and he has no TARDIS; but I found myself willy-nilly picturing him as the 11th Doctor, as played by the inimitable Matt Smith.

What else to say about it? It was a fun story, very much in the vein of the current Dr. Who episodes, with all that that implies, being silly and horrific by turns. Given that, my only serious complaint is that April Malone and Smith both seem a little too present day in their attitudes to fit in 1890 in Boston. There’s one brief exchange about homosexuality, for example, that seems completely out of place given the setting and the participants but that would fit right in in a Dr. Who episode.

Be that as it may, it was entertaining, and certainly worth 99 cents.