kmg365 's review for:

The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice by Wilkie Collins

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Reading this book has made me realize why only two of Collins's novels are widely known-- they're not all masterpieces. I was well past the one-hour point in the audio before the word hotel was even mentioned, and the titular hotel didn't even exist for over half the narrative.

Collins portrays his female characters sympathetically. Since the primary villain of this piece is a woman, I was surprised that even she was treated sympathetically. Near the end of the book, the Countess Narona tells her version of what happened, and as with modern villains, she is the heroine of her story, though few others would see it that way.

Even with her explanation, it was difficult to understand why she acted like she did. She went from ill to well and back to ill in the space of a minute or two. She claimed that she was subject to a will stronger than her own, but whose? She still seems to lack a will of her own even after the obvious suspects had no more will to impose. If she was supposed to have been controlled by something supernatural, we are left without a clue as to who or what it was. She was a party to cold-blooded murder without a second thought, yet having to face the very-very-extremely-not-scary Agnes filled her with dread. I found her incomprehensible, but she is at least not one-dimensional.

Although the book is extremely back-loaded-- nothing exciting happens until the last third-- I found the primary twist in Narona's tale inventive and clever. I got a chuckle out of the narrator's declaration that 30 year old women are middle-aged, as well. Also, don't get bronchitis a third time, because evidently that's fatal.