When you discover an author you want to read all of his or her older books. Well I do - and because I got given a WW2 thriller to review called "The Second Objective" by Mark Frost, I sourced and bought his first two books. The List of Seven is a cracker. Frost's main character is Arthur Conan Doyle - a struggling young Doctor with a passing interest in the occult. Almost losing his life at a seance Doyle gets tangled up in a plot to - well that would be telling. Along with way he encounters Jack Sparks, the twins Barry and Larry and the feisty Eileen Temple.
Frost grounds the lightening paced action using real people and throws in nods to characters and vices Doyle later writes into the Sherlock Holmes novels. The author has a way of creating characters you care about and then doing the most terrible things to them. There was a follow-up. The Six Messiahs which is set 10 years later and while it's a good read, it's not as gripping as List of Seven.
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