Hugh Pentecost

As manager of New York City's finest luxury hotel The Beaumont, Pierre Chambrun is well acquainted with unreasonable requests from its patrons. When one of the rich rooftop suite owners demands the impossible for his annual birthday bash, Chambrun is unflustered; of course he can have exotic foods and flora flown in from all corners of the globe! No problem procuring the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera to sing "Happy Birthday!" No matter that birthday boy is the obnoxious and well-hated Aubrey Moon—a man who loves nothing better than destroying the lives of those who annoy him. Pierre is more than equal to the task. But when a high-society call girl commits suicide in one of the Beaumont's suites, Pierre learns she'd been under pressure to murder Moon. He also discovers that there is a "Moon Club" made up of people with good reasons to wish the man dead. When an anonymous big spender offers $10,000 to any club member able to exterminate the menace, Chambrun works with his chief of security and the NYPD to catch the mastermind before the plot—and Moon—are executed.

From the creative mind of Hugh Pentecost comes a terrifying and prophetic novel that potentially influenced the Chowchilla kidnapping in 1976. The Day the Children Vanished is not for the faint of heart, as readers are taken down the rabbit hole of the mysterious disappearance of nine children, the school bus they rode on, and its driver. On a bright, clear winter afternoon, nine children in the town of Clayton disappeared from the face of the earth on their commute to the Regional School of Lakeview. Missing with the children are the bus in which they traveled and its driver...​ They vanished completely. So mysteriously so that some distraught citizen of Clayton suggest it was as if they'd been sucked up into outer space by a monstrous interplanetary vacuum cleaner. Dive into the mysterious, twisted mind of the winner of the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America and see for yourself just how the nine children of Clayton disappeared that winter. One of Hugh Pentecost's most tantalizing stories, Pentecost has "a certain hand and a crafty mind" (The New Yorker).

Just as Cancelled in Red took Inspector Luke Bradley, the soft-spoken, hard-boiled cop, through the intriguing maze of the stamp collecting racket, so this mystery tangles Bradley up in the fast tanbark crowd. The 24th Horse gallops after a host of hard-faced people, some of them with more money than is good for them - and others, unfortunately, with far too little. From the minute Johnny Curtin drives a coup with the body of a murdered girl in the rumble seat to Inspector Bradley's door, this novel keeps moving - fast The 24th Horse is a tense, absorbing mystery novel that will hold the reader to the final page as Bradley sets a trap for a desperate killer - and finds himself face to face with death

Max Adrian was the rare stamp broker everyone in the know avoided. It never mattered to the shifty broker, until someone demanded a refund at gunpoint. Soon afterward, a dishy dame convinces Larry Storm, Adrian's rival, to play amateur detective for a hidden cache of priceless stamps. Storm is one step ahead of the tenacious Inspector Luke Bradley, who's one step behind a cold-blooded killer - and Storm had better start running.... Cancelled in Red appeared in Argosy magazine, touted as the $10,000 prize winner of the 1939 Dodd Mead Mystery Contest. The novel also grabbed the $1,000 Red Badge Prize Mystery title, and launched the career of "Hugh Pentecost," the pen name to the prolific Judson P. Philips, author of mysteries.