The Haunted Hotel

A London doctor is slipping out of his own house to avoid a patient who refuses to leave, when she opens the consulting-room door, takes his arm, and asks him whether she is going mad. She is the Countess Narona, and in a week she marries the man she took from Agnes Lockwood. The story moves to a damp rented palace in Venice, where a courier vanishes without collecting his wages, a thousand-pound note reaches his wife anonymously, and two insurance commissioners search the vaults and find nothing.

When the palace reopens as a hotel, the bedroom where a lord died has been quietly renumbered, and one guest after another asks to be moved. Ghost story and murder plot, braided by a founder of English detective fiction.