The Hound of the Baskervilles
A family curse, a moor, a escaped convict and a dog that may or may not be supernatural. Conan Doyle brought Holmes back for this novel after killing him off, and set it in Devon rather than London, which gives the book its atmosphere.
The detective is absent for a long stretch in the middle, and the novel survives because the narrator, Watson, is allowed to be competent. The solution is fair, the red herrings are well placed, and the gothic machinery is used with restraint. It is the best of the four Holmes novels.
Public-domain status
First published in 1902. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, so this work has been free to republish there since 2001.
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