Doctor Who: The Secret in Vault 13

Doctor Who: The Secret in Vault 13 by David Solomons is a Thirteenth Doctor adventure for 10 year olds that opens with a giant robot and gets sillier and stranger from there.

What happens

It begins with the robot's point of view, which is a lovely way in. A Mark VI combat mechanical has chased four humans across a planet all day and is now assessing them one by one before it finishes the job.

Ryan, no armour, unhelpful shoes. Yaz, some sort of training, no real battle experience. Graham, eyesight fading, dismissed in a microsecond. And the fourth one, about whom it knows nothing except that she is clearly in charge.

Then its audio scan picks up two heartbeats.

Here is where your reader works out, several seconds before the robot does, exactly who it has been chasing. That gap is the whole joke and the book plays it beautifully.

The Doctor, having run the machine around the planet purely to see what it could do, walks to the mouth of the cave and surrenders on purpose.

What follows is a throne room twelve kilometres above a blasted plain, a Space Lord with a speech he gives to everybody he defeats, and the Doctor asking him what he plans to do with the rest of his life. Graham suggests bus driving.

That's the tone all the way through. The Doctor is cheerful, rude and about four steps ahead. Graham grumbles. Ryan and Yaz swap looks because they have seen this grin before.

After that the actual plot arrives, and it is a proper one. A message for help turns up in the least likely form imaginable. There's a school nobody leaves alive, something living in the tunnels beneath an unremarkable bit of London, and a vault on a frozen world that no visitor has ever walked out of.

One thing to flag. The Space Lord keeps his defeated enemies alive in glass jars beside his throne, crammed in so tightly they cannot turn their heads. It's described plainly and it is genuinely nasty, and it sits in the first few pages. There is a death ray too, which slices a boulder in half. If your child finds cruelty harder to shake off than monsters, that opening is the bit to know about. For most readers it will simply be the thing the Doctor puts right.

Your reader does not need to have watched the programme. Everything they need is explained inside the story, usually by somebody complaining.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the same Doctor and the same author turn up again in The Maze of Doom, which starts on Crete around 2000 BC with a boy called Icarus watching something enormous fall out of the sky.