The Celebrity of Anders Hecht — Robert Graham

One of the most famous men in the world in his youth, Anders Hecht has disappeared from a pleasure boat near Tenerife. His once glamorous wife, Cornelia has been murdered. The invited guests on his pleasure boat interrogate each other for motives. All their lives had been transformed by Anders, the glamorous, electrifying enchanter of audiences in the Paris riots of 1968 and Cornelia, publisher of Europe's most sophisticated magazine, yet all had motives for murder. The marriage of the Hechts had been the most publicised, the most admired. Anders' fame and influence had frightened governments. Suddenly Anders changed direction, abandoning his cause. Suddenly the golden marriage sank into bitterness. The reasons were a mystery even to those who had lived with them, worked with them or slept with them. Now, some thirty years on they were discovering that what had seemed like the past, had seemed to die, was very much alive in all of them. Suddenly their attempts at investigation are disturbed by the great interrogator, the Spanish Inspector Rojas. Rojas is dapper, patient, evidently without emotion. He has never loved or hated but as an observer of human frailty he is without equal. And yet he is the ideal investigator, for back in the Paris riots of 1968 Rojas too had been brought to life and thrilled for the only time in his life at the magnetism of Anders Hecht. In Hecht he had seen the passion, the sexuality, the intensity he had lacked before or since. Left with his cold passion for truth he uncovers from the passengers all that they had wished to hide and why murder had taken place.