Walking Dead Man

By Hugh Pentecost

As X-rated stars descend on the Beaumont Hotel, someone takes a shot at its owner.

Terrified of flying, Beaumont Hotel owner George Battle hasn't seen America in seventeen years, instead spending his days on the Riviera, counting his money. But pressing business calls him back to the United States: a seven million dollar investment in the latest epic directed by Maxwell Zorn, king of highbrow celluloid smut. It's the kind of motion picture that even an old man will want to oversee personally.

As Zorn's outlandish entourage swarms the illustrious hotel, Battle takes residence in the penthouse suite of his infallible manager, Pierre Chambrun. On his first night there, a bullet splinters the headboard just inches from his face. Was the shot meant for him or Chambrun? The Beaumont's top brass must tread lightly. Die, and the Beaumont dies with them -- a blow from which the jet-set will never recover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784087876

Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost was a penname of mystery author Judson Philips (1903–1989). Born in Massachusetts, Philips came of age during the golden age of pulp magazines, and spent the 1930s writing suspense fiction and sports stories for a number of famous pulps. His first book was Hold ’Em Girls! The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Men and Football (1936). In 1939, his crime story Cancelled in Red won the Red Badge prize, launching his career as a novelist. Philips went on to write nearly one hundred books over the next five decades. His best-known characters were Pierre Chambrun, a sleuthing hotel manager who first appeared in The Cannibal Who Overate (1962), and the one-legged investigative reporter Peter Styles, introduced in Laughter Trap (1964). Although he spent his last years with failing vision and poor health, Philips continued writing daily. His final novel was the posthumously published Pattern for Terror (1989).