The Haunted Hotel (1879) – Wilkie Collins Free Audiobook

Written by Wilkie Collins
Read by Jonathan Keeble
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
Release date: 11-08-19
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks

When Lord Montbarry dies suddenly in his Venice palace, and his courier goes missing, suspicion is instantly thrown on his new wife, the beautiful Countess Narona, who has collected his life insurance and fled to America. Montbarry’s former fiance, Agnes, still harboring feelings for him, and Henry Westwick, Montbarry’s younger brother, decide to investigate this tragedy and head for the palace, now a hotel. Not long after their arrival they experience strange and unsettling occurrences, and the circumstances of Montbarry’s death begin to unravel.

“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 othwrs.”– AudioFile 2020,