Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The novella The Haunted Hotel is a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place in an ancient palazzo converted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secret. No Thoroughfare is a stage play produced by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, Walter Wilding, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. After the death of one — now a proprietor of a wine merchant’s company — the executors, to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean — across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine, Marguerite, and a faithful company servant.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Hide and Seek is the story about the girl named Mary — they called her Madonna, and she was deaf and dumb and beautiful as a painting by Raphael. All they did know about her identity was that she’d lost her hearing in an accident, and the proprietor of the circus had treated her horribly, and in her cache of secret personal private things, she owned one thing as precious to her as life itself: a bracelet made of brown human hair with the initials MG tied into it.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Heart and Science turns on the fate of the orphaned Carmina Graywell, who is left in the charge of her aunt and guardian Mrs. Gallilee when her fiance is forced to take an extended trip to Canada’s drier climes in order to recover his health, Over the issue of her inheritance Mrs. Gallilee schemes to manipulate, control and ultimately destroy the naive but strong-willed Carmina.