This is part of the "trapped on Earth" story arc that began with The Ancestor Cell and The Burning, which I read over fifteen years ago; an amnesiac Doctor is left on Earth in 1890 to make a rendezvous with his companion Fitz in 2001, giving him and the TARDIS over a century to recuperate. This story details what the Doctor was up to during World War II, as he becomes involved in the activities of a group of aliens trapped in Nazi Germany.

I remember finding what I read of the post-Burning novels a mixed bag: while the novels did have the freedom to be more inventive and weird in the new post-Time Lord universe, it wasn't really clear to me what purpose the Doctor's amnesia was meant to serve. He seemed to always know how to do things anyway, and always remembered what was necessary for the plot. The Turing Test, however, makes great use of this premise, possibly the greatest of any EDA I've read. This Doctor is among humans, but knows he is not of them-- yet does not know who he actually is. So while a "normal" Doctor might thwart some aliens, this Doctor genuinely does not know what his "side" is. This approach is amplified by having the story narrated from the outside in the first person; the narrators here know less of the Doctor than we do, so we can read between the lines, but in some ways, we know as little as they do of this new Doctor. When telling the story from, say, a companion role, I think it's impossible to really render the Doctor as unknowable, but Leonard does an excellent job here of using his narrators to create distance and danger. Overall, this is an effective and gripping story of WWII intrigue and violence. I don't think it's the best Doctor Who novel but it is in the top tier.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2070376.html

The book is told in the first person by, in turn, Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller, as they one by one accompany the Doctor from Oxford through occupied France to Dresden in 1944, on the trail of some presumably alien signals. The Turing part is rather good, even if the author must heavily insist on Turing's crush on the Doctor; the Greene and Heller sections totally fail to catch the styles of their ostensible narrators, and the plot is not in fact resolved. Reading the ecstatic fan reviews I realise that I am clearly in a minority. ( )

I enjoyed the start, but the second half didn't really work out for me. ( )

Really quite good. I enjoyed the narrators (Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller). A complex and interesting story. I didn't even mind that it was set in WWII (I'm quite sick of WWII as a setting). ( )

Can I just say "Brilliant!"?

Set during middle of the Doctor's amneisiac century stranded on Earth, and in the middle of World War Two, this looks at the Doctor through the eyes of three famous but flawed narrators - Alan Turing, Graeme Greene and Joseph Heller. The contrast between the Doctor, the unidentified other aliens in the story and the humans caught up in the war is wonderfully illustrated.

Some people disliked the earthbound story arc in he books and dislike the focus on Earth in the new series. But surrounding the Doctor with (more or less) contemporary humans really works in bringing out the alien qualities in his personality. Here the narrators ponder whether he's man, angel or alien but end up seeing and judging him through their own preconceptions and prejudices. ( )