Publisher's Synopsis
"The startling contrast between the corpse-like pallor of her complexion and the overpowering life and light, the glittering metallic brightness in her large black eyes, held him literally spell-bound."
The ghost of Lord Montberry haunts the Palace Hotel in Venice --- or does it? Montberry's beautiful-yet-terrifying wife, the Countess Narona, and her erstwhile brother are the center of the terror that fills the Palace Hotel. Are their malefactions at the root of the haunting -- or is there something darker, something much more unknowable at work?
The Countess writes a ghost story in the form of a play which is in effect a confession of a murder by herself and her husband. The story, which might be fiction or may very well be the truth, tells a grisly tale of a body decapitated and disposed of by acid ...
Wilkie Collins's little known horror-ghost story of 1878 recalls his two prior triumphs 'The Woman in White' and 'The Moonstone' with its use of detective procedures and mystery-genre plot twists that made those two earlier novels so popular with Victorian readers.
