Sign of the Four

Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street with a strange request: for six years she has received an anonymous pearl every year, and now she has been summoned to a mysterious meeting. Her missing father, a stolen Agra treasure, a wooden-legged man, and a fatal blowpipe dart draw Holmes and Watson into a case spanning the Andaman Islands and the London docks. Published in 1890, this second Holmes novel introduces Watson's future wife and cements the detective's methods of deduction - while delivering one of the great Thames chase sequences in Victorian fiction.