I thought The Clockwise Man was definitely the best of the three - I quite enjoyed The Monsters Inside, but I thought the The Winner Takes All was pretty dire.

In answer to your question

I've read it and quite enjoyed it: it's not the best of the Doctor Who books written by Paul Magrs, but if you don't like nonsense, I can understand why you didn't like this.

Having said that, this book is a lot more sensible than Verdigris that has evil robotic sheep on casters, and Mad Dogs And Englishmen which has Pink Talking Poodles in.

It depends on how bizzare you like things, Magrs' novels get very mixed reaction. For very good Doctor Who books try anything (except for the Space Age) by Steve Lyons.

Or for some of the best emotinally written and very involving ones try Human Nature by Paul Cornell (Virgin NA), The Return Of The Living Dad by Kate Orman (Virgin NA) or Year Of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman (BBC Novel).

In the winner takes all the bad wolf reference was

cj

The books very an awful lot in terms of quality and styles. I just finish 'Amorality Tale' by David Bishop and it was dire - the worst of Dicks writing with lines of dialog that made me inwardly cringe. And yet some people would enjoy this because it "invokes the era" that it was made in.

On the other hand you could get the story "Rags", which is set during the 3rd Doctor. Featuring extreme violence (I did wince many times reading it), lesbianism, orgams and so forth, it was certainly bound to cause controversy. I loved it though because it used the book medium to push the series into realms that could never have been explored otherwise and still had the character's cores true to themselves.

My favourite of the lot was the 61-book long "New Adventures" series by Virgin. I loved the mini-arcs they introduced - and not just those in the first quartet and trilogy, but the ones that concluded in "No Future". The conflicts with Ace/New Ace and the brilliant Bernice. "Human Nature" came about then too - brilliantly humanistic, which was why I looked forward to "Father's Day" in the new series. And then it ended with "Lungbarrow" which reveals a lot of detail about the Doctor's distant past, explains how Susan is his granddaughter but not, and even reveals the identify of the terrible Zodin.

Recently, I'm still trying to get through the BBC EDAs. I think the series suffers from a lack of longer arcs that were permitted under Virgin's reign. I loved what Lawrence Miles was trying to do with his time-travelling voodoo cultists, Faction Paradox (so much so that I've purchased the spin-off novels) but really want to see it wrapped up correctly. It just hasn't got me as involved as the older ones have, which is a shame because they've got some talented writers there.

All in all, I must have over 200 Dr. Who books (prolly closer to 300), so I can certainly say there's a few well worth reading and some not..

Actually they don't. There is no regeneration in the final 8th Doctor book (The Gallifrey Chronicles) and Gallifrey's fate in the books was due to different circumstances to those mentioned in the TV series. They're not really part of the same canon.