Fusing drama, supernatural, and borrowed characteristics from gothic mystery, Collins creates a modern mystery of a haunted hotel. An eminent doctor is visited by a desperate woman with a question: am I evil, or insane? When the letters from an Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered. In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and suddenly dies. Is there no explanation of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel? Is The Haunted Hotel the tale of a haunting -- or the tale of a crime? 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? Collins's novels were extremely popular in his own time as now. The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) are his best known works.