Time of Terror

By Hugh Pentecost

When an army of freedom fighters takes the entire Beaumont hostage, Chambrun contemplates a commando attack.

Pierre Chambrun, the elegant manager of the Beaumont Hotel, gets the call just after breakfast: The fifteenth floor has been seized. Armed with guns, grenades, and plastic explosives, a gang of guerrillas has taken the daughters of the British ambassador hostage, and they are ready to kill to make themselves heard. For these men are combatants, veterans of the war in Vietnam who have come to demand justice for South Vietnamese political prisoners, as well as the release of American soldiers accused of massacring civilians and court martials for the generals who started the war in the first place. Their demands are impossible, but their firepower cannot be ignored.

As Chambrun scrambles to rescue his hotel, he does everything he can to stall the madmen, including sending them all the room service they can eat. But in just a few days, trigger fingers will start to itch, and the world-famous Beaumont Hotel may be blown sky high.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784087890

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). 

Reviews for Time of Terror

[shanm816 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While I generally enjoy this series of mysteries, set in the glamorous Hotel Beaumont, this was not my favorite. One of the things I like about the series is the hotel itself, and the descriptions of the different bars and restaurants, all of which Pierre Chambrun knows every detail of, and this book didn't have as much of that. Although all of the action takes place inside the hotel, there just wasn't the attention to detail that I remember from other books. To be fair, it's been at least a year since I've read any in this series, so it may be that my memory is faulty. If you aren't already familiar with this series, I don't think this book will impress you.