At a hotel in a resort town in the Bavarian Alps, a retired district attorney from Chicago is shot dead. Crime reporter Peter Holm is on the spot and joins in the murder investigation.
Scheduled for demolition, Hotel Continental has seen 50 years of romance, intrigue, and tragedy. The last night attracts many nostalgic patrons, including a gangster planning to grab the loot that he hid there many years ago.
Thelma and Zazu are on a leisurely excursion in a borrowed car. Thelma lets Zazu drive. When she brakes to avoid a bull pulled along by three rustics, her foot gets stuck and the car crashes through a barn.
Guests at a luxury hotel are horrified when they witness a man literally "disappear into thin air." The vanished man's relatives hire a detective, who goes to the hotel to investigate the disappearance.
A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed.