From The Six Million Dollar Man, through Emmy nominations for Hill Street Blues, to an erstwhile partnership with Emperor of the Pop-Bizarre, David Lynch, that birthed the delirious Twin Peaks (and the not-so-delirious On The Air), Mark Frost's writing career has been nothing if not colourful. Last year he debuted as a movie director with the ragged hot-house thriller Storyville ("a twisted hotchpotch of sex, murder and family intrigue"), and now gifts his maiden novel, a book that he claims just "popped" into his head one hot summer's day.

Christmas Day 1884: doctor, struggling author, and general debunker of cod-mysticism, Arthur Conan Doyle is in receipt of a urgent call to a seance in the East End, where Lady Caroline Nicholson is desperate for news of her missing child. Almost too late, Doyle appreciates an elaborate black magical trap and flees after witnessing a vicious murder - into the arms of the flamboyant Jack Sparks, self-proclaimed special agent to the Crown. Together, the adventurers embark upon a shadowy, fevered cross-country flight as they combat the horrors that lie at the heart of a diabolical coven - the Dark Brotherhood - and plots and schemes that threaten the very fabric of civilisation.

Frost here is diving into murky waters much favoured by Britain's own Kim Newman (Anno Dracula) - alternate histories, speculating with historical figures, describing his work as ‘a post-Freudian, metaphysical look back how a man like that comes to be and what conflicts and antagonists would form him.’ And it is, of course, all patently ridiculous, of which you can be sure Frost himself knows only too well. The secret to a book like this is, therefore, the suspension of disbelief sufficiently to carry the reader in its wake without asking too many questions in the process: in that, it is highly successful.

As befits a writer with a name made visually, The List of Seven brims with picturesque invention, be it the manor at Topping with its grotesque, gigantic fortifications, the cavernous storage vault treasure houses of the British Museum, or the surreal molecular-alterations that literally rubberise Doyle's home. Frost treats Britain as a huge chess board across which to move his pieces, the book a breathless quest through London, Cambridge, and north to a violent encounter at Whitby Abbey (where Dracula's very own Bram Stoker makes a notable cameo), be it in carriage chases, or aboard a mysterious private underground train. And along the way the author also finds time to slip in the ‘ingenious heroes and despicable villains’ that would later shape the adventures of Doyle's immortal creation, Sherlock Holmes.

On occasion Frost seems a little too-deeply embedded in his fictional world to gain a proper perspective - hence the kind of milk-curdling London accents that would make even Dick Van Dyke blush, and the odd jarring Americanism - but for the most part he keeps the fires stoked high enough to railroad any potential creaks in the plot. The result is a nicely written, darkly compelling roller-coaster of a book, leaping with nimble foot from the witty to the outrageous to the ultra-violent with page-turning ease. A confident, hugely entertaining and, replete with a nicely stinging coda, biting shot across the bows.