Elementary My Dear....

"With due consideration given to the other variables, I'd say there's a ten percent chance of that. If not, there is every reason to believe that what we have in our possession here is nothing less than a list of the Dark Brotherhood's innermost council. Seven names: Seven is a profane as well as sacred number." The List of Seven by Mark Frost.

I love a good adventure book as much as the next person, so I'm not having a go at the genre when I say that this book falls /way/ short of the high accumen in adventure given to it by the Seattle Times. If you want to know what life was like in Victorian England as far as crime and investigation is concerned look elsewhere... or go get a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Speaking of Holmes... The one thing I did like about the novel was the main character being one Dr Arthur Conan Doyle... now where have we heard that name before? That however is where the "well played" in the story ends. There is no clear building of the tension in the story... you jump right in and stay at a peak the whole way through. Far from making it an nailbiting ride what it actually does is mean that the ending just... fizzles out. It's worse than an anticlimax... it just fades away into nothing ness with only a weak twist in the two page epilogue of the book.

Very disappointing.