SilvertonAudio

First published in 1890, The Sign of the Four is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's second book starring legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The story is complex, involving a secret between four ex-cons from India and a hidden treasure. More complex than the first Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four also introduces the detective's drug habit and leaves breadcrumbs for the listener that lead toward the final resolution. Each year following the strange disappearance of her father, Miss Morstan has received a present of a rare and lustrous pearl. Now, on the day she is summoned to meet her anonymous benefactor, she consults Holmes and Watson.

"There's a scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it." From the moment Dr. John Watson takes lodgings in Baker Street with the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, he becomes intimately acquainted with the bloody violence and frightening ingenuity of the criminal mind. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson's first mystery, the pair are summoned to a south London house where they find a dead man whose face is a twisted mask of horror. The body is unmarked by violence, but on the wall a mysterious word has been written in blood. The police are baffled by the crime and its circumstances. But when Sherlock Holmes applies his brilliantly logical mind to the problem, he uncovers a tragic tale of love and deadly revenge. “[Holmes] is probably the only literary creation since the creations of Dickens which has really passed into the life and language of the people.” —G. K. Chesterton