Doyle's novels on the incomparable and inimitable Sherlock Holmes are presumably some of the most significant detective stories ever written, drawing a perfectly unique and charismatic character with a lot of recognition value, accompanied by Watson, the everyman commenting on Sherlock's ways of behaviour with observations and comments of his own. I've only read one of them so far before deciding to download the ,,Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", a collection of twelve different short stories, which can be found free of charge and legally on the website of Project Gutenberg. And I have to admit, the one I read was probably not the best one to start with when reading the Sherlock novels - it was ,,The Valley of Fear", Doyle's seventh Sherlock novel, and probably the weakest one, judging from several reviews and my own feeling about it. After reading that one, I quitted reading the Sherlock novels for some months, finding it difficult to bestir myself to read ,,A Study in Scarlet", the first novel about Sherlock if I got it right. But now it has finally found its place on my ,,to-read-next" list. 
 ,,A Scandal in Bohemia" has been the inspiration for the first episode of the second season of BBC's successful Sherlock Holmes TV adaption. By creating the interesting character of Irene Adler, Doyle managed to show another new side of the perfectly portrayed character of Sherlock (not to mention that the modernized version of Irene Adler, played by Lara Pulver, has been even more interesting and versatile with all those different sides the authors decided to allow her character to show). It is no particularly long story (approximately 8,5k words) and, thus, cannot be compared to any of Doyle's novels (only one of which has been read by me so far, a fact I'm willing to change during the next time). But Doyle was capable of creating an interesting atmosphere, especially by including a lot of humorous conversations, and his writing style is pretty captivating (sort of the contrary to what I remember about reading ,,The Valley of Fear", but I'm prepared to eliminate my poor impression of this one in order to gain a new opinion on the Sherlock novels). 
 I'd give this short story 4.0 stars, recommending it to everyone who likes reading a well-plotted crime story with interesting characters. And it's free, so don't think too long about reading this - just read it.