The Hound of the Baskervilles

Name: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Rating: 4.13 (401557 reviews)

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Book 5 in the Sherlock Holmes series.

First published 1902

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4.1(401,557)

Dr James Mortimer asks Holmes to protect Sir Henry Baskerville, the new heir to a Devon estate shadowed by a family legend. Sir Charles Baskerville has died on the path beside Baskerville Hall, apparently terrified by something on the moor, and a gigantic hound is said to punish the descendants of the violent Hugo Baskerville. Holmes sends Watson to Dartmoor, where an escaped convict, mysterious signals, nocturnal footsteps and the dangerous Grimpen Mire make it difficult to distinguish human conspiracy from supernatural threat.

Watson’s reports gradually connect the household at Baskerville Hall with the neighbouring naturalist Stapleton and his supposed sister. Holmes’s concealed investigation reveals that the legend has been deliberately weaponised to secure an inheritance, using fear, isolation and a trained animal to disguise murder. The novel combines rational detection with Gothic landscape, ancestral guilt and the social vulnerability of an heir returning from abroad.