"The Sign Of The Four" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 8/10

"The Watchmen" put me in need of some comfort reading, and my fallbacks in this department have long been Sherlock and Rumpole.  So I worked my way through Doyle's second novel-length story following his famous detective, in which we discover Holmes's drug habit and Watson's private life.

Remember how I mentioned "A Study In Scarlet" as establishing a long-running Holmes trope of Sherlock solving the case quickly and then getting a long story from the caught perpetrator? Yeah, we get that again here.  I say that flippantly, but this story is wonderful, and I knew it was wonderful (hence my going to it for comfort in a dark and depressing time).

In this story will get travel from London to India and hear tales of secret treasure and deep betrayal.  Its stellar, and if you haven't read Holmes before this is a great one to read- after "A Study In Scarlet."

Hi there, Jeremy Brett!