This paper introduces chain replication, a technique for replicated distributed systems that can maintain strong consistency guarantees such as ACID, while still providing good performance and reliability when things fail. I'm not completely convinced that this is novel or necessarily the best choice, but this paper is a great example of presenting a relatively simple idea and exploring it very well. Definitely a technique worth investigating, although I never like it when people propose a system that relies on a Paxos master election. I guess that is what happens when you make strong consistency guarantees.
R. van Renesse, F. B. Schneider. Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability. In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'04), San Francisco, CA, December 2004.