Maybe I wasn’t a Nancy Drew fanatic, but I used to devour every book I could find in the Boxcar Children series and The New Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley series as a child. I was a huge mystery reader back then, but not anymore. Picking up a mystery book again, in fact one of the best in the genre like The Hound of the Baskervilles, proved to loads to fun.

As this is my first Sherlock Holmes book, I’m not sure how the narration works in the other books but I loved it here. I’m glad that the story was told through the perspective of Dr. Watson, Holmes’ assistant. The infamous detective Sherlock Holmes is too cold and arrogant of a man and I probably couldn’t have put up with him if he took the front seat of the action. I liked how the readers got a chance to see Holmes’ wits and logic in the beginning before he went behind-the-scenes for the majority of the book until the very end. This allows Watson to shine through; his loyal charming personality as opposed to Holmes’ personality puts a twist to the story. (Apparently, in the book previous to this one, Holmes had died jumping off a cliff, but the public was so heartbroken that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had to start writing books pre-dating other Homes books. He sort of brought Holmes back from the dead this way.)

The resolution was predictable, but nonetheless, I enjoyed it. The daunting English moors, the beautiful descriptions, the page-turning plot with twists and surprises, and the interesting characters made up a great mystery.