Time of Terror

Pierre Chambrun Mystery #11

by Hugh Pentecost

The elegant calm of New York's top luxury hotel is shattered when the mysterious Colonel Coriander arrives. Wearing a fright wig and mask, the one-armed terromonger has planted bombs throughout the building and is holding two small girls hostage. And he's always once crucial step ahead of Hotel Beaumont's legendary manager, Pierre Chambrun. Coriander's outrageous demands are quite impossible to meet. Chambrun's only chance is to outwit the very clever Colonel at his own game--in the countdown to terror.

Genres: Mystery

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Hugh Pentecost was a penname of mystery author Judson Philips. 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

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time of Terror (1975) is the eleventh book in Hugh Pentecost's (aka Judson Phillips) series featuring the Hotel Beaumont's legendary manager, Pierre Chambrun. The Beaumont is known for its elegant calm and Chambrun is the man who sees that it stays that way. But the calm is broken when a one-armed man named Colonel Coriander wearing a child's pirate's mask (a la 1970s plastic, covers-the-whole-face style) and a black fright wig takes the children of a British diplomat hostage and claims he has rigged the entire fifteenth floor with explosives--enough to cut Chambrun's beautiful hotel in half. He says he represents a group called the Army for Justice and the justice they are looking for is on behalf of the men and women who served in Vietnam. In fact he has a small army of thirty posted all over the fifteenth floor with enough ammo to hold off the marines (or whoever Chambrun wants to send their way).

They just have a few demands. Nothing too difficult--just the release of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam, 50 million dollars (so they can rehabilitate those prisoners), the release of veterans being held in jail for killing North Vietnamese citizens....and the replacement of those veterans with the military brass in command who were really responsible for the activities in Vietnam. Chambrun knows quite well that these demands are impossible to meet. At best, they might come up with a portion of the money demanded. So, he has to work with men from the State Department, FBI, and local law enforcement to come up with a plan that will see the girls released safely, the criminals caught, and will leave his beloved hotel in one piece.

As I mentioned when I reviewed Pentecost's The Fourteen Dilemma a couple of years ago, this is an exciting and fast-paced story, but Pentecost expects a huge amount of belief suspension in these stories. I know that Chambrun is has served as a member of the French Resistance in World War II, but it's still hard to swallow some of the details in these stories. For instance, we're supposed to cheerfully believe that someone was able to smuggle thirty men plus all that weaponry plus all those explosives into the hotel without anybody noticing. Uh-huh. But despite all that, Chambrun is a powerful personality and so well-written we're willing to go along with Pentecost just for the sake of another exciting adventure at the Beaumont. I was very thankful that the girls come out of their ordeal safely and all in one piece (Coriander makes threats about sending ears and fingers if there's any delay...). ★★★ for a solid, fast-paced mystery.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.

[Monica Willyard Moen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast paced mystery involving two children who are kidnapped in a luxury hotel by a renegade colonel.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another good nostalgic read with a twist ending.

[Shannon Martinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Michele bookloverforever · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a young woman during the time period of this tale. It was a bewildering time for all of us. Patty Hearst, young Getty, SLA..