Reviews Torchwood: Consequences by DJ Forrest

Written by Joseph Lidster

For BBC Books

Published 2009

Nina Rogers has been involved in a lot of the stories throughout the various books but it wasn’t until I’d finished reading ‘Bay of the Dead’ by Mark Morris that I started to see a pattern.  It’s like watching a DVD or playing a computer game and discovering an Easter Egg. 

Nina rents a room from Rianne Kilkenny the nurse who we first met in ‘Bay of the Dead’.  Nina seems to spend a lot of her time getting drunk, but if you consider all that has occurred in and around Nina’s life, I’d imagine you would hit the bottle every night. 

Nina is in university and she spends a lot of time in the library catching up on course work with her friend Jessica Montague, who I’ve wondered if she is some direct descendant of a particular Admiral in the first story.  She’s also another person we discover in ‘Bay of the Dead’, but the more Nina seems to spend there the less she seems to remember any other events.  But when she does remember events they seem to involve Torchwood, ‘Captain Cheese’ and in particular, Ianto. It’s worth noting that in a series of books Nina Rogers appears somewhere and Consequences sums up her travels. 

The story also ties up a lot of loose ends from every other story within the book which is quite like the playground game Consequences, and if you remember how that game played, you’ll know the answers are always in the last place you think of looking. But, to understand the ending, you need to be aware of how it started. 

Although Joseph Lidster is mostly known for scripting audio books and dramas, and episodes of SJA, Torchwood and Doctor Who, he is also very good at writing short stories, and putting Consequences together just goes to show what a talent the writer has.  It’s light and full of humour and you really get to grips with the characters, in fact you’re sure you know of Nina, probably met her in the street, bumped into her with your Starbucks or smiled to her over a bar of loud music and overpriced alcohol. 

The story keeps you hooked till the very last page and I will now have to put all my books in order to track Nina’s events throughout them, properly.