Good music, fine dining and comfortable surroundings - that''s how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture and murder - that''s what it becomes famous for.

The popular hotel on the English coast built its reputation on its Viennese cuisine and Austrian style but when one of the guests is found dead at the bottom of the nearby cliffs bearing the wounds of a man who has been systematically tortured, Gently brushes aside the hotel''s facade of respectability.

International intrigue and a dark secret that stretches from Nazi-occupied Austria across the Atlantic to the back streets of New York leave Gently juggling with a deadly conundrum.