Risk Assessment (novel)

Risk Assessment
Main character(s):	Jack, Gwen, Ianto
Featuring:	Rhys, Queen Victoria
Main enemy:	The Vam
Main setting:	Cardiff, 2009
Key crew
Publisher:	BBC Books
Writer:	James Goss
Release details
Release number:	13
Release date:	15 October 2009
Format:	Hardcover Book
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-84607-783-8
BBC Torchwood novels
← Previous	The House That Jack Built
Next →	The Undertaker's Gift

Risk Assessment was the thirteenth release in the BBC Torchwood Novels series.

Publisher's summary

Agnes Havisham is awake, and Jack is worried (and not a little afraid). The Torchwood Assessor is roused from her sleep in only the worst of times — it's happened just four times in the last 100 years. Can the situation really be so bad? Someone, somewhere, is fighting a war, and they're losing badly. The coffins of the dead are coming through the Rift. With thousands of alien bodies floating in the Bristol Channel, it's down to Torchwood to round them all up before a lethal plague breaks out. And now they'll have to do it by the book — the 1901 edition!

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Captain Jack Harkness
• Gwen Cooper
• Ianto Jones
• Agnes Havisham
• Rhys Williams
• Professor Hess
• George Herbert Sanderson
• Slyrr
• Henderson
• Queen Victoria
• Vam
• Pigeon
• Nina Rogers
• zZxgbtl

References

• Gwen toys with the idea of ringing up Martha Jones for some "pre-wedding gossip".
• Rhys has an Auntie Joyce and an Uncle Hywel.
• Agnes is referred to as Little Bo Peep.
• Merthyr is mentioned.
• Jack and Agnes discuss Torchwood One, the London Rift and Torchwood Four.
• Agnes mentions the Borgias.
• Torchwood owns a speedboat.
• Victoria knows the Dowager Mrs Gowan.
• Victoria owns a house on the Solent.
• The Vam's eats Suzanne and learns she had an unresolved romantic attachment to a man named Brian.
• Jack uses an Ice Warrior sonic cannon and the singularity scalpel to kill the Vam.
• Planet X is the homeworld of the XXltttxtolxtol.
• In the 1960s Jack helped Torchwood defeat an invasion from the Ice Warriors. Torchwood salvaged their sonic cannons.

Notes

• This book is also available as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store.

Continuity

• Gwen remembers that Jack once spent two thousand years underground. (TV: Exit Wounds)
• Nina Rogers also appears in Bay of the Dead, The House That Jack Built and Consequences and is mentioned in The Undertaker's Gift
• Agnes mentions the events of TV: The Unquiet Dead.
• Whilst fighting a robotic soldier trying to open a subspace rift above the East India Docks, Agnes says that Torchwood can easily handle a space-time rift and that it is "far from Doomsday", a reference to TV: Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, as this spatial rift would cause Torchwood to build Canary Wharf and lead to the events of those episodes.
• After the loss of the Sea Queen ship in AUDIO: The Sin Eaters, Torchwood have replaced it with the Sea Queen II.
• Slyrr's comments on females, specifically mentioning the "thorax", mimic Jingo Linx's comments in TV: The Time Warrior.
• Torchwood Three have recently encountered the Daleks. (TV: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End)
• Martha Jones is about to get married. (TV: The End of Time)
• The coffins each have a mauve marking. Mauve was previosuly established as the universal colour for danger. (TV: The Empty Child)
• Agnes states that those close to Jack Harkness tend to die. By this point, Estelle Cole, (TV: Small Worlds) Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato had died. (TV: Exits Wounds) Ianto Jones, (TV: Children of Earth: Day Four) Jack's grandson Steven Carter (TV: Children of Earth: Day Five) and Esther Drummond would all face similar fates. (TV: The Blood Line)
• The first human victim of the Vam is an estate agent who has an unresolved romantic attachment to a man named Brian. The team previously looked into the disappearance of estate agent Brian Shaw. (PROSE: SkyPoint)
• Gwen returns to SkyPoint. (PROSE: SkyPoint)

External links

• Official Risk Assessment page at Penguin Books
• Risk Assessment at the Doctor Who Reference Guide