Alan Hunter

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.

Chief Inspector Gently's quiet Easter break is rudely interrupted when a local timber merchant is found dead. The Norchester police gratefully accept Gently's offer to help investigate the murder, but he soon clashes with the officer in charge of the case. Locking horns with the local law is a distraction Gently can do without when he's on the trail of a killer.

Chief Inspector Gently's fishing holiday on the waterways around Norchester is interrupted by the discovery of a local man's body in a burnt out boat. Somewhere beneath the lies of the victim's wife, obscured by the brittle edge of her daughter's fear and hidden by her son's hysteria, lies the truth. Gently's only hope is to sweep aside the litter of chaos and confusion to uncover the identity of the killer.

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull and dump him in the river.

When a teenage biker is killed in a crash, most people regard it as an inevitable consequence of the kids using drugs and racing bikes for kicks. But the evidence points to the young man's death being something more sinister than a mere accident and Chief Superintendent Gently is drawn into a world populated by disaffected teenagers.

When petty crook Steinie Taylor turns up dead in a hopper of flour at a country bakery, Inspector George Gently has to figure out not only how he got there, but also why his prime suspects all appear to have a dark secret to hide. Why had the deceased villain and his two friends been spending money like it was going out of fashion? Why did Taylor's friends both disappear? The investigation becomes even more sinister when one of Taylor's cronies is also found dead.

Chief Inspector George Gently finds himself dodging bullets when he investigates the murder of a trucker who died in a hail of gunfire. Murdered in a lonely lay-by in the heart of the countryside, the trucker is identified as a Polish immigrant. Was this a revenge killing, a quarrel over money, an underworld execution or something even more sinister?

The strange death of Charles Berney, savaged and trampled to death by a horse on a windswept stretch of moorland, came as he had apparently settled down with an attractive young wife and was concentrating on developing his business.

He may have argued with his wife at her birthday party the night before his death, but when he set off for a business meeting in London the following morning, no one expected him to end up murdered on the moor. How did he get there? 

The answer comes only after Gently has unravelled one of the most bizarre cases of his entire career

In a British seaside holiday resort at the height of the season, you would not expect to find a naked corpse, punctured with stab wounds, lying on the sand. Chief Inspector George Gently is called in to investigate the disturbing murder. Who knows where or when the murderer might strike again?

When a young woman is discovered lying dead on the beach, Chief Superintendent Gently joins the throngs of summer visitors in the midst of a summer heatwave, to investigate. But when the long-buried skeleton of a woman is unearthed close to where the body was found, Gently suddenly has the riddle of two mysterious deaths to solve.

Having been invited to spend Christmas in the country, Chief Superintendent Gently finds himself investigating when a guest at Merely Hall, a nearby stately home, is found dead. At first the tragedy is assumed to be a simple accident, but Gently is not one to jump to conclusions and is soon in no doubt that this was murder.

In 1997 a group of WW2 American veterans visit their old air base, where they find a skeleton from fifty years ago. Can Inspector Gently solve this crime from so long ago?