Lewis Romayne returns to the family home, Vange Abbey, after a fatal duel in France - the memory of which still haunts him. In an attempt to put the experience behind him, he visits London where he meets Stella Eynecourt, who will become his wife. However, Romayne also comes across the cunning Father Benwell, who is determined to convert him to Catholicism and to regain Vange Abbey for the Church. Father Benwell stops at nothing to achieve his end, including the revelation of a dark secret from the past. His scheming and malevolence recalls the better-known villain Count Fosco, from Collins's The Woman in White. Published in 1881, The Black Robe is one of Collins's later novels and is here presented in a multi-voice production featuring a host of popular audiobook actors.
The embarrassment of riches among Naxos's narrators doesn't benefit this production, sadly. Wilkie Collins's melodramatic romance involves troubled marriages and religious intrigue. Nicholas Boulton's third-person narration also includes interpolated sections (mostly letters), in which the same characters Boulton has portrayed are acted by others. A long, final section of diary excerpts is perform
