The hound isn't the only thing you'll see coming.

I was really looking forward to reading The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because of the amazing looks of Benedict Cumberbatch and the even more amazing writing of Steven Moffat. But I'm really sad to say this won't be the most positive of the reviews I do on this list. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing crime novel and you can't go wrong reading anything with the infamous detective but I have two major points that would keep me from just giving a blanket recommendation that everyone should read this.

To start with, if you are looking for a really good mystery and I mean a mystery that really keeps you guessing, this is not for you. I'd tell you to run off and read any of Agatha Christie's novels. Not that this isn't a mystery, mind you. It's just not particularly... mysterious. I guessed the killer and the motive almost as soon as the evidence was presented. Which isn't bad. It just makes it less of a mystery when you get to the end. At no point while reading this did I say, "Oh crap, I did not see that coming!" It was very cool how the evidence is weaved into every part of the story and at points, even Watson writes some details off as important but if you know anything about Sherlock Holmes, no detail is too small. It seemed new details revealed themselves on almost every page and some seemed so trivial to begin with but became important pieces to the story in the end.

I don't think this is a great place to start with Sherlock Holmes. I've seen both Robert Downing Jr. movies and I've seen most of the aforementioned brilliance of Moffat's BBC adaptation and this book was seriously lacking in the famous detective department. We don't get to witness the brilliance of Holmes' keen observation powers except for a few brief chapters in the beginning and the end. I was missing reading about the great detective in action. But it piqued my interest in the novels themselves and I'd love to go back and read the other three. This one was a quick read for such a long book. The action moves along at a good pace and I got to a point where I didn't want to put it down.