The story revolves around the case of Miss Mary Sutherland, a woman with a substantial income from the interest on a fund set up for her. She is engaged to a quiet Londoner who has recently disappeared. Sherlock Holmes's detective powers are barely challenged as this turns out to be quite an elementary case for him, much as it puzzles Watson.  (details...)

Forest Row in the Weald is the scene of a gruesome harpoon murder, and a young police inspector, Stanley Hopkins, asks Holmes, whom he greatly admires as a mentor, for some help. Holmes has already determined that it would take a great deal of strength and skill to run a man through with a harpoon and embed it in the wall behind him besides. Peter Carey, the 50-year-old victim and former master of the Sea Unicorn of Dundee, was a most unpleasant man, especially when he was drunk. He had a reputation for being violent, even having been prosecuted once for assaulting the local vicar. His daughter is actually glad that he is dead. She and her mother have endured years of abuse from the old whaler and sealer, who moreover had some remarkably peculiar habits. He did not sleep in the family house, but in an outhouse that he built some distance from the house, and which he decorated to look like a sailor’s cabin on a ship. This is where he was found harpooned. Hopkins could find no footprints or other physical evidence.  (details...)

Holmes is brought into the investigation of what appears a simple, obvious case of a son murdering his father shortly after the son was seen by witnesses near, and at, the scene of the man's death. Set in 1888, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called down to Boscombe Valley (a fictitious place in Herefordshire) to investigate the death of Mr. Charles McCarthy. Lestrade, a detective from Scotland Yard whose meagre abilities are often upstaged by Holmes's brilliant deductions, has concluded without much ado that it is a murder, and that McCarthy's son James is the killer. James was seen by one witness following his father to the nearby pond, and another, a young girl, saw the two remonstrating with each other by the pond. Holmes will not accept Lestrade's conclusions, however, as there are some facts that simply do not seem to fit. Whom was McCarthy going to the pond to meet? He had told his serving-man that he had to keep an appointment there, from which he never came back alive.  (details...)

One of the most dangerous classes in the world," says Holmes, "is the drifting and friendless woman. And Lady Frances Carfax is such, and who has fallen into the clutches of a phony preacher." Holmes sends Dr. Watson to Lausanne to investigate Lady Frances Carfax’s disappearance. Holmes is too busy in London. Lady Frances is a lone, unwed woman denied a rich inheritance because of her sex. She does, however, carry valuable jewels with her. It is also her habit to write to her old governess, Miss Dobney, every other week, but for the past five weeks, there has not been a word from her. She has left the Hôtel National for parts unknown. Her last two bank transactions were cheques, one to pay her hotel bill, and another for £50 to her maid, Miss Marie Devine. In Switzerland, Watson finds out that Lady Frances stayed at the Hôtel International for several weeks, but then suddenly left in a hurry one day. Only one witness could suggest an explanation, one involving a big, bearded man who kept hounding her. It also emerges that Lady Frances’s maid has left her employ, although it is not known why.  (details...)

Holmes wakes Dr. Watson up early one morning to rush to a murder scene at the Abbey Grange near Chislehurst. Sir Eustace Brackenstall has been killed, apparently by a gang of burglars. Inspector Stanley Hopkins believes that it was the well-known Randall gang, a father and two sons. Upon arrival at the Abbey Grange, Lady Brackenstall is found resting with a purple swelling over one eye, the result of a blow during the foregoing night’s business. There are also two red spots on her arm. Her maid later tells Holmes that Sir Eustace inflicted those with a hatpin. Lady Brackenstall tells Holmes that her marriage was not happy. Sir Eustace Brackenstall was a violent, abusive alcoholic. Moreover, Lady Brackenstall found it hard to adjust to life in England after the freedom that she enjoyed in her native Australia, which she left only 18 months ago. She was married for about a year. The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes.  (details...)