An American millionaire tries to buy a steak and a bottle of beer in London's grandest hotel, is refused, and buys the hotel instead - after which the staff begin to disappear. Bennett wrote it as a serial in the year the century turned, for money, at speed, and produced the ancestor of every glamorous hotel thriller since. Sixty plates by painters including James Tissot and Giovanni Boldini, spanning 1750 to 1927, picture the hotel's world of fashionable interiors, river views and café society, the very milieu Bennett's mystery moves through.