People of Red Rocket Rising, my fellow citizens. Our long night is over. I've been contacted by a benevolent people. They too have known great trials, but they have overcome them and made it their mission to help others do the same. They have offered us refuge, and passage to the nearest human worlds. They have the resources, and the patience and compassion, to evacuate every one of us. My fellow citizens, my friends, rescue is at hand!

The crashed ship. The one Tom Cardwell saw all those years ago. And you borrowed its technology, didn't you? Maybe even found a Dalek or two in the wreckage. Dead, but intact. And you began to turn human beings into creatures like them. You did that? I'm right, aren't I?

Beware the hands that heal. The Doctor and Peri land on the planet Necros to visit the funerary home Tranquil Repose – where the dead are interred and the near-dead placed in suspended animation until such time as their conditions can be cured. But the Great Healer of Tranquil Repose is far from benign. Under his command, Daleks guard the catacombs where sickening experiments are conducted on human bodies. The new life he offers the dying comes at a terrible cost – and the Doctor and Peri are being lured into a trap that will change them forever. At last, the only classic-era Doctor Who adventure never to be novelised is here, and by the author of the original script, Eric Saward.

Self-exiled to a new universe, separated from his TARDIS, opposed and manipulated by the Divergence and their agent the Kro'ka, the Doctor has been struggling to work out the nature of the cosmic game in which he's an unwilling pawn. Now, at last, he has a chance to find the answer and regain the TARDIS!

In the 1960s, the BBC screened 253 episdoes of its cult science fiction show Doctor Who, starring William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton as the time travelling doctor. Yet by 1975, the Corporation had wiped the master tapes of every single one to these episodes. Of the 124 Doctor Who episodes starring Jon Pertwee shown between 1970 and 1974, the BBC destroyed over half of the original transmission tapes within two years of their original broadcast. For the first time this book looks in detail at how the episodes came to be missing in the first place, and examines how material subsequently came to be returned to the BBC.