The Hound of the Baskervilles

A ghostly hound stalks the moor in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes mystery, read slowly and softly for sleep.

Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on the grounds of his lonely country house, his face frozen in fear. Nearby in the mud are the footprints of an enormous hound. The Baskerville family has long lived under a curse: legend says a devilish beast has hunted their line since a wicked ancestor broke a deal with the devil centuries ago. When the last heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, arrives from abroad to claim the estate, Sherlock Holmes takes the case, though it is Dr. Watson who travels down to gloomy Dartmoor to keep watch over the new master of Baskerville Hall.

Watson settles into the old house and its strange household, and soon finds the moor full of odd characters and stranger sounds. A naturalist and his sister live nearby, an escaped convict is loose on the wild heath, and somewhere out past the fog and standing stones comes a low, terrible howl. Watson sends his reports back to London, certain something is deeply wrong, while Holmes works from the shadows before finally joining the hunt to piece together what is animal, what is legend, and what is murder.

It's a gothic mystery built on fog-bound moors, family curses, and a detective story that still holds up as one of the great locked-house puzzles in crime fiction. Fans of classic whodunits, English country-house mysteries, or anyone who grew up on Holmes and Watson will find the familiar pleasure of clues laid out fair and square, waiting to be pieced together.

The pace stays calm even as the story turns eerie, so the creak of the manor and the cry across the moor become part of the hush rather than a jolt. Let them carry you under while the mystery is still unsolved.