Like Poe before him and Conan Doyle after, Wilkie Collins shifted easily from rational domains to the "superrational." Famed for his detective literature, he often preferred to indulge his predilection for the occult. Collins' themes, developed and elaborated in his earlier, massive novels, are streamlined and concentrated here into a tight novelette. Venice provides the scenery and fatal beauty, the grim waterways and palaces which the author haunts with mysterious women, grotesques, and bloody conspiracies.
