The Hotel Majestic (Penguin Modern Classics)

When the strangled body of Mrs Clark, the wife of a wealthy American industrialist, is found in the basement of the Hotel Majestic, Superintendent Maigret begins probing into the dead woman's past. He soon discovers that she once worked as a hostess at La Belle Etoile nightclub in Cannes, where she was known as Mimi. Could someone she knew in Cannes have lured her into the hotel basement? And why was she carrying a gun in her handbag?

Maigret's investigations take him from the endless corridors, the dansants and bustling kitchens of the hotel near the Champs-Elysees to the countryside of the Bois de Boulogne and sun-drenched Cannes, and into a world of prostitution, drug addiction and blackmail.