jasonfurman 's review for:

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

4.0

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I picked this up almost at random on a table in a bookstore and was pleasantly surprised--it was an excellent Wilkie Collins (short) novel that contains suspense, melodrama, fate, horror, possibly the supernatural, and more. It is a page turner from the very beginning, with a mysterious woman visiting a doctor to ask him if she is insane and then moving in a fast paced manner to the disappearance of a courier and then a set of strange occurrences centering around a particular hotel room in Venice. The perspective of the book shifts around some and it includes a rather large cast, many of them related, none of them especially exciting as characters but largely of interest as projectiles in the rapidly moving plot that brings together a range of loose ends in a surprising and satisfying manner.