Welcome to the Hotel Noir, peerless gem of hospitality and sole holder of a Michelin star on the island of St. Germaine.

When the controversial American author Francis Stein is stabbed to death in the hotels environs, the search for his murderer takes islander Bat Manley north to the other half of Steins double life, south to St. Germaines vice-ridden slums, and finally into the realm of the psyche, where the blind see and the dead speak.

A kaleidoscopic striptease of the human soul, Hotel Noir will make you sweat.

Who hasn't dreamed of a life in the perfect French chateau?
When electronics magnate David Crown finds himself at the scene of a hate crime, his idyll in the Midi countryside abruptly ends. Against a backdrop of Gallic bonhomie and summer's languid ripening, David, his bookish girlfriend Rowena, and his demented mother Miriam struggle to make a home of a gilded Mansard as it swiftly devolves into a web of mishap and murder. With deftness and compassion, Casper Silk entwines the destinies of a village thrust into the new millennium, a teenager convicted of a firebombing, and a man...