THE HAUNTED HOTEL

Narrator Jonathan Keeble brings an appropriately haughty upper-crust tone to this 1879 story of a British lord, his dead brother, an odd baron, and a mysterious countess. Their fates become intertwined when the family purchases a decrepit and thoroughly uninviting palace in Venice. When the palace is refurbished into a swank hotel, arguments, incriminations, and apparitions come out of the woodwork. Keeble is especially adept at voicing the dialogue between the carefully drawn characters. Next to his good friend, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins was one of the best known and best paid British novelists of the nineteenth century. His "sensations," or mystery/suspense novels, were all the rage and paved the way for Conan Doyle and a host of others. B.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2020]