The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

I love the stories, and will read the others, but I found them a little too simple for an adult. Maybe it's because I'm used to something more intricate, maybe I read these as a child and I just don't rememberit - and the answers are already in my head. While I wasn't as smart as Holmes, it was close. I guess I expected something more challenging. Besides what seems like obvious outcomes, even for me (i.e. I don't like to try to solve the ending, I like the ride), I did find the reader and the writing/stories entertaining. Essentially, I gave it a 5 for that, and a 3 for story depth.

Numerical corruption and 140 year old english aside, this is a pretty good book, but I prefer my crime mysteries to present the facts so that I might be able to solve it as well. Sherlock Holmes would be much more a hero in my mind if all of the evidence was presented, and yet it was still difficult to solve the issue at hand.

An entertaining read, nonetheless.

Bonus points to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for being a free kindle book and for being one of the greatest firsts of its kind. That being said, the quality of the book is not quiet as "timeless" as I had hoped. I read Sherlock Holmes right after finishing Treasure Island and before that, Around the World in 80 Days. Needless to say, these other "classics" I had picked up were more impressive than I could have imagined and easily hold their own to anything written in modern adventure/thriller novels. I wish the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gave the readers a little more freedom to venture other possible solutions and to really stir the imagination but, sadly, it does not.

This Kindle freebie is great for readers who are only keen to read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The stories contained within this title are:

A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-Headed League
A Case of Identity
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The Five Orange Pips
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches


This Kindle freebie does NOT include "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes", "The Return of Sherlock Holmes", "His Last Bow", "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes", or the novels, i.e. "A Study in Scarlet", "The Sign of Four", "The Hound of the Baskervilles", and "The Valley of Fear".

It is an excellent "purchase" for readers who would like to enjoy reading about the intrepid Holmes and Watson on their adventures. The formatting is okay, i.e. not excellent but not overly annoying either. As is the case with many other Kindle titles, the Table of Contents is not one which is reader-friendly - one cannot simply click on a particular story to get to it, but has to manually scroll through. I hope this is addressed as more books become available as Kindle titles. On the whole, I have little to complain about, except for the lamentable lack of illustrations. To those who love Sherlock Holmes, I would recommend getting not just the complete stories and if you don't mind a truly bulky (yet beautiful set), I would suggest the annotated set by Leslie S. Klinger,The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) and The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume 3: The Novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear) (non-slipcased edition).

I had finished reading this edition before I realized it was incomplete. The Bedford Park edition The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection, with attractive cover illustration of London Bridge, is a much better edition overall, with proper formatting of numbers, and contains all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels.
It was extremely annoying to encounter strange symbols every time a number is mentioned, and to be forced to decipher badly-formatted html to figure out what number was being stated. Also, a variety of line breaks in the wrong places were very frustrating.
This edition is simply not worth trying to save $0.99.