【 THE VALLEY OF FEAR 】

book #7 in the Sherlock Holmes series

Genre: Classic, Mystery
Audience: Adult
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Published: January 1914
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Pages: 240 (paperback)

There is something so exciting about being treated to a full-length Sherlock Holmes novel, particularly when this is the last one of them! Don’t get me wrong, the short stories are brilliant, but it’s fun to stay with the famous detective for many more pages.

That being said, I won’t lie, this doesn’t hold a candle to The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Sign of Four, in my opinion. But it’s still a very fun, gritty mystery – with an excellent twist at the end. It followed a similar structure of many of his other novels, where it’s split into two parts: part one being the mystery, and part two being the backstory.

There are many great things to enjoy in this one. It starts off in a great fashion with a fun cypher code that Holmes must decipher – only to find out the next instant that the person who sent it has been killed. And off we go on the mystery! It’s a fascinating setting for murder, being an estate surrounded by a moat, where the drawbridge is taken up each night, making it impossible to get in or out of the house once it’s up.

And the mystery is full of impossibilities just like this. There are long debates between Holmes and the authorities as to how exactly the murder could have been pulled off. Timings, strange occurrences relating to the victim’s finger rings and the impossibility of escaping after the murder was done, all come together to form a juicy plot.

I’m so close to rating this five stars, but there’s just something about the split of the novel into two parts that dampens the whole effect for me. Even though the backstory is really interesting, it feels like an extremely long-winded way to get to the point. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and I did not see the twist coming in the backstory – which suddenly makes the main mystery make so much sense – but the structure perhaps just isn’t for me.

All in all, a lot of good fun and a really interesting plot to uncover! And of course, listening to the audiobook version narrated by Stephen Fry, as I did, made this all the more enjoyable.

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Title: The Valley of Fear
Series: Sherlock Holmes
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
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The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty’s criminal organization alerts Sherlock Holmes of the evil deed by means of a cipher . . .

When Holmes and Watson arrive at a Sussex manor house they appear to be too late. The discovery of a body suggests that Moriarty’s henchmen have been at their work. But there is much more to this tale of murder than at first meets the eye.