I came to this expecting a light Edwardian entertainment — chandeliers, intrigue, a millionaire solving a mystery while wearing evening dress.

What I found instead was a novel with a genuinely interesting argument buried inside the entertainment: that buying a thing is not the same as controlling it.

Racksole purchases the Grand Babylon Hotel because he is irritated by the service. He owns the building by chapter two. The secrets persist anyway. Ownership confers no access to the system’s real operations — its networks, its arrangements, its accumulated discretion. The building was never the point.

Bennett understood something about modern power that most thriller writers miss: the interesting question is not who owns the room, but who actually runs it, and from where, and why they prefer not to be seen.

The Overlords sent this one down with a note that said: Everyone important passes through.

They were right. Just not in the way they thought.

— G. H. Schreiber 

15/02/2026