well written book about a civil war expirence! Excellent use of a family history in a fictional type setting, but with enough true history to make the story that much more interesting. A very different way of looking at the war through one man's perspective, his thoughts and the way it really must have been.

A novel based on the author's great-grandfather's Civil War experiences in the 13th Pa."Bucktail" Regt. I have read the book and recommend it to all that have an interest in the Civil War.

Edward J. Duffel, Past Commander
TN. Sons of Union Vet. of Civil War

I agree with the previous review. This is an exceptionally well put together and just plain fun Holmes adventure. I've read most of the others out there on the market today, and sad to say none of the others really measure up to this one. It has finally been reprinted with three short stories as "A Sherlockian Quartet". If you can find it, buy it! You won't regret it. Just out of curiosity, does any one know if this is the same Rick Boyer who wrote Billingsgate Shoal?

What a shame this book is out of print. The author is faithful to the original Arthur Conan Doyle style, and keeps you on the edge of your seat. The 'giant rat' would be great in a Stephen Speilberg movie, and I'm surprised no one has caught on to this idea yet. I almost never read a fiction book more than once, but this one is so good that I've read it at least five times over the years. Any Sherlock Holmes fan will love this book, and any one who likes a good mystery adventure will greatly enjoy it. I don't know if Boyer ever won any awards for this, but he should have!

Very informative, and a lot of fun to read. For new readers, a great introduction to Holmes and his world; for old-timers like me, a fun refresher course! Highly Recommended!

The soft-cover Wordsworth Classics edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes reproduces The Hound of the Baskervilles and the short stories that make up The Return of Sherlock Holmes as they originally appeared in the Strand. It also contains the interesting, though poorly reproduced, illustrations that accompanied the stories. Because a page of the magazine is reduced to the size of a trade paperback page, typeface is very small.

As an Englishman. resident in the United States, what do I miss most? The BBC. As a little boy I looked forward to all the broadcast plays every week. The BBC cast performed about 6 hours of radio plays every week. They still do, haven't you also noticed the number of TV plays broadcast by A and E? Most of them originate in the United Kingdom, Hornblower, ETC.. Now we can enjoy the performances by means of these Bantam Double Day releases. Very well done, by a very experienced cast, you can let your imagination run riot as you picture the various scenes in your mind. These are the classic stories by Sir Arther Conan Doyle. They have been around for 100 years or so, and time has not diminished their appeal. On this Audio Book you have 4 stories, each about 45 minutes long. If you haven't heard these before, then I don't wish to spoil the story line. If you know the stories then you will not be disappointed. Each story is presented in the time period of around the 1900's, you can almost smell the gas lighting, not to mention the foggy november weather, the horses, and so on. Order these from Amazon, and search for more of the BBC plays, they are great.

This is a faithful reprinting of the greatest mystery book(s) ever written. It is well written, powerful, captivating, and puts the Hardy Boys to shame. Holmes solves mysteries in a believable (if difficult) fashion that never fails to grip someone from start to finish. The stories are so well written, in fact, that when Sherlock Holmes "died" fans responded by rioting in the streets of London. The Queen insisted that Conan Doyle bring back his famous character, and so here he is. While we might not be willing to riot in the streets if Holmes died today, we can still feel loyalty towards the famous character, and the legacy that Conan Doyle left behind in these books.

Dear peers, My opinion is that the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is one of the best book I have ever read.Sherlock Holmes is a good book because it challenges your knowledge. The plot are full of mystery and action.As I read the book, I could not put it down because I felt that I was Sherlock solving the case. Sherlock was one of the best in his time peroid. This information can be found at Conan Doyle's website. The author was known for his intelligence and ways of solving mysteries. For an example in the Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes Mr. Waston said "you are the best". He was admired all over Scotland. He always wanted a mystery to challenge his intelligence. before the person even knew what they would say he knew. He never told them, he would just wait and try to catch them in the act. Some people say Sherlock is nosey and rude. For an example he didn't listen to the man when he asked him what his daughter was doing in his office. Another example he went into someone basement because he was sure the criminals were making a tunnel to rob the city bank. Sometimes when he lies, the lies are to help other people from imbarassment.for example in the case of the star spangled banner. He said that the man got bit by his pet snake when he was playing with it. Sherlock figured the girl had been through enough and If he was to tell her it would make her depreesed and imbarass if someone should ask her about the incident. If you are in to mystery and adventure then The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes is the book for you. Your'e not be able to put the book down after you start to read it. You should not judge a book by it's cover: It may look oldfashion but the stories are great even in modern times.

Are you ready to accompany the greatest detective in history on some of his most memorable adventures? Then this book is for you! Each of these stories are wonderfully put together, each with a more exciting and unexpected outcome. I have read them time and again, and am always newly surprised at Holmes's genius and reasoning abilities.

Are you still hesitant on whether or not to read "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?" Well, I personally am not much of a mystery fan. In fact, some of my favorite books are "Watership Down," "The Hobbit," "A Wrinkle in Time" series, and "The Lost Years of Merlin" books. I also know that mystery books are either awful, by. But Sherlock Holmes and his cases have set the highest of standards for mysteries, which very few others have even come close to surpassing.

Through this great collection, I have come to greatly admire both Holmes's and Doyle's brilliance over and over again. No matter what genre you enjoy reading, this is a book for you!

Richard Lancelyn Green has examined nearly a century's worth of Holmesian pastiches and collected some of the very best in this book. Stories date from 1920 through the 1980's.

Many pastiches try to parody or reinvent the originals, but theses stories affectionately recapture the flavor and tone of the canon.

In this volume Richard Lancelyn Green has assembled some of the best of the noncanonical Holmes short stories as of 1986. I personally think _The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes_ by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr is a slightly better collection overall, but this one comes close.

Adrian Conan Doyle is represented here as well, the adventure of "Arnsworth Castle" being simply a republication of "The Red Widow" from _Exploits_. (I disagree with the reviewer who thought the story was a "complete failure," but I also disagree with anthologist Green that it is the strongest of the younger Doyle's Holmes pastiches.)

The highlight of the collection is undoubtedly Denis O. Smith's "The Purple Hand." This is the first of Smith's Holmes tales (of which another -- "The Silver Buckle" -- appears in _The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures_); in general they are among the best pastiches in the short-story genre. (Smith has published them in three volumes under the title _The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes_.)

Other high points include "The Tired Captain" and "The Green Empress," based on two unrecorded cases mentioned by Watson in the first paragraph of "The Naval Treaty." The latter of the two cases requires a brief explanation.

"The Green Empress" is the new title of the tale mentioned in a review below under the name "The Second Stain." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, wrote a story of that title as well, but the version he published does not match the description in "The Naval Treaty." Some Sherlockians (according to Green) also claim to find a reference to another "Second Stain" case in "The Yellow Face," though I do not happen to know the foundation of this claim. There would thus appear to have been at least two and perhaps three Holmes cases catalogued by Watson under the same name.

F.P. Cellie's tale fills in the details of the one mentioned in "The Naval Treaty." In 1967 it won a contest in South Africa under its original title of "The Second Stain," and its title has been altered for publication in the present volume. End of explanation.

Another highlight: this volume is the only one currently in print -- so far as I know -- in which Vincent Starrett's classic "The Unique _Hamlet_" is collected. In my own view this pastiche is somewhat overrated (being among other things ludicrously easy to solve), but at any rate it's a good one to have; at least it was one of the first, having been privately published in 1920.

And another point which may be of interest to Amazon shoppers: the larger and more recent collection _The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures_, edited by Michael Ashley (and with a foreword by Green), does not include _any_ overlap with the present volume. Owners of one may therefore feel safe in purchasing the other.

I've just finished this and am amazed by how much I enjoyed it - I'd bought it expecting to hate it but not so. It's very patchy but no more so than Conan Doyle's original stories, and the only really terrible bit is one effort by his son Adrian which is a complete failure, although a very involved thing about Scotland (which left me wondering, why couldn't he have just put the brooch in his pocket? - you'll know what I mean when you've read it) tries the patience rather. Best are the 'Purple Hand' and 'Second Stain' stories, both of which the man himself would have been very proud of, but all are honourable additions to the mythos, hugely enjoyable and very sensitive to the much-loved originals.

Actually, 5 stars as a quick reference, 1 star as an administrator manual. This is a somewhat weird book. Heaven help any company when an administrator decides to switch a NT network to Linux, or set up Linux from scratch, with just this book. If everything goes well, the network will run, but if something goes wrong, good luck trying to recover. But curiously enough, it is usually the book I reach for if I can't remember exactly how setting something up works. Short, to the point coverage of how to install or setup things. But if your options don't include nuke-and-reinstall, find an administrator handbook somewhere to supplement it.

The book approaches the principal subjects on Linux, FileSharing, LDPA, WebServer, FTPServer and etc, all very well documented, rich in details and examples. He was lacking documentation on LinuxClient (KDE, Gnome, applications for the user in general) very superficial. But it is a book that should be bought and read, all the topics are very interesting and useful, while I read I was thrilled, because other solutions NON microsoft exist.

It is a great book! It covers a lot of detail in deploying Linux, the consideration, advantage, and most important, the procedure. I have setup my fax server, database server, file-and-print server, web server, e-mail server, all running on Linux, after reading this book!

This collection presents more of the Mutual Broadcasting System's Holmes radio shows from a time after Rathbone and Bruce had left the show, as had writers Anthony Boucher and Dennis Green. Unlike the Simon & Schuster collections of tales from the Bruce/Rathbone era, this collection presents 12 consecutive tales in chronological order of presentation. Also, unlike the Simon & Schuster presentations, this collection dispenses with the pre- and post-story commentary. With the extra tape, they present three, rather than two, stories per cassette.

Every third story is an adaptation of a Conan Doyle story, so the quality of those stories is superb. When Meiser is left to her own devices in writing, she can produce very uneven work. "The Case of the Well Staged Murder" makes for satisfying listening, but "Professor Moriarty and the Diamond Jubilee" is quite contrived, and "New Years Eve in the Scilly Isles" is downright silly. A firebug is seen deserting a ship as it sails out of harbor. The Captain is radioed that the ship will probably go up in smoke at the stroke of twelve on New Years Eve. The lives of 2,000 passengers and crew hang in the balance. So does the Captain turn around and go back to port to unload the passengers and search for the time bombe? Nope. He sails on for 18 hours until he is far at sea and there is only an hour left until midnight. But Holmes arrives in a yacht just in the nick of time. This has my vote for the most contrived Holmes radio pastiche of all times.

John Stanley sounds more like Rathbone than Rathbone, and doesn't muff his lines as often. Alfred Shirley tries manfully, but he cannot quite convey the warmth of Bruce's Watson. The organ music is more subdued and not quite as annoying, but Meiser makes Holmes far too disagreeable. He is the rudest Holmes I have encountered, and very nearly the most conceited. I'm sure that on several occasions, the only thing that prevented Watson from inviting Holmes outside for fisticuffs was the fact that Holmes was an expert amateur boxer.

The 60 page booklet that comes with the collection is a gold mine of information for Holmes afficionados.

Kel Richards, a fellow Australian, has written a series of 3 books about Sherlock Holmes investigating supernatural (or seemingly supernatural) occurrences starting with this one.

In 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire', Holmes says: "This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply." His willingness to accept supernatural possibilities in this book is solidly against this view.

The story itself, even ignoring these non-Holmesian views, is fairly simple and has some ludicrous aspects that were not well appreciated by me.

I also didn't like he sudden Christian homily added at the end of the story. While I have no doubt that Holmes and Watson are Christians, their religion has never been in focus in the stories, and it seemed grafted on - presumably either reflecting the faith of the author, or because of some endeavour to counterbalance the supernatural elements for some imagined religious group who might object to the supernatural tone.

I get the impression that this book was written for a younger audience (although it is not stated so anywhere I can see), but even so I don't think it is a good introduction to Holmes for young readers.

Like 'The Curse of the Pharaohs', the first book in this series, this book suffers from a Holmes willing to believe in the supernatural, a fairly limited plot (although better this time than last), and a Christian homily at the end (which, again, is more in tune with the book than the last time).

Holmes is called in to investigate the sighting a the ghost of a headless monk on an island, one of a pair of islands, the other of which contains a lighthouse, its keeper and his family. While legends of the ghost have been heard for some time, the effect of sighting the ghost on the lighthouse keeper's wife is extreme. Once they are there, Homes and Watson discover that there are a number of other events which must be understood to correctly resolve the mystery.

This story is an attempt to tell the tale of the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant, mentioned in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger'. It fails to do so successfully as Kel Richards fails to address the fact that, in that story, Watson threatens to reveal that story due to attempts made to destroy his case papers, and that at least one reader would understand. I can't explain why not without detailing the story completely, but suffice to say it does not.