LITMIR.BIZ

In the little town of Mitford, New South Wales, four babies have been stolen – all boys, all under three months old, and all apparently neglected by their mothers. The local police have given up and the trail is cold. Then a fifth child vanishes, and the mother is found dead next to the empty cot. Inspector Bonaparte is called in, first to find the missing children, and only then to solve the murder…<br /> <br /><i>Bony – a unique figure among top-flight detectives.</i> – BBC

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The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of Venom House – perhaps because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aboriginals slaughtered by the Answerth ancestors. Whatever the reason, most people are content to give Venom House and its occupants a wide berth… until a couple of corpses turn up in the lake…<br /> <br /><i>The strength of Upfield's accomplishment in this book is so overwhelming it makes the reader cower. The characters are well-developed, the conversation vernacular for the Australian outback, and the development compelling. The story is the nearest Upfield comes to a story that would have made Edgar Allen Poe envious, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing… The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction.</i> – from <i>The Spirit of Australia </i>by Ray Browne.

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The nude body of a man is discovered entombed in the walls of Split Point Lighthouse on the south-east coast of Australia. Inspector Bonaparte wonders why a coffin is moved at night, who was the girl struggling with Dick Lake on the cliff tops, and what caused the Bully Buccaneers to deal in death. An ordinary policeman could afford to fail, but Bony, never…<br /> <br /><i>The story takes place at Split Point, 80 miles between Anglesea and Lorne… The story is enlivened – and made more stark by contrast – by a series of Dickensian characters who are unexcelled in Upfield and perhaps elsewhere as well. Despite the solemnity of the occasion for the visit, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing… The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction.</i> – from <i>The Spirit of Australia</i> by Ray Browne

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When two elderly bachelors were poisoned with cyanide, a strange woman was on the scene each time – but now she has disappeared, leaving no trace. Tracking her down in a town of twenty-eight thousand people is a job to tax even Detective Inspector Bonaparte's powers. He will need the unorthodox assistance of burglar Jimmy the Screwsman and a lightning-sketch artist, as well as all the deductive and tracking skills at his command, as he trails a killer no-one has seen…

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Broome is a little sun-drenched town on the barren north-west coast of Australia, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business, where all the little bungalows might be glass for all the secrets they hide. How then had the murderer of Broome's two most attractive widows got away without leaving a single clue? Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte investigates, with his usual calm precision – but the murderer strikes again, and Bony realizes he is dealing with a madman – that time is running out…<br /> <br /><i>Bony – a unique figure among top-flight detectives</i> – BBC

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Eight hundred kilometres from the sea, Lake Otway is dying. Heat, drought, and thirst-crazed animals take their toll. When Ray Gillen, lucky lottery winner, went for a swim one night and never came back, some thought it was an accident, or was it murder? As the water level drops, five men and two women wait beside the shrinking lake – for the body, the money, or neither. And watching it all, Bony…<br /> <br /><i>Death of a Lake is as intense and unremitting story as Upfield ever wrote. It should be, for it is very close to Upfield's personality … being the real Albermarle Station where Upfield was first hired as a cook in the 1920s and where he began his writing career … In a hut at Wheeler's Well Upfield was inspired to write his Bony after a visit by Upfield's friend tracker Leon Wood.</i> – from <i>The Spirit of Australia </i>by Ray Browne.<br /> <br /><i>Bony – a unique figure among top-flight detectives</i> – BBC

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A cat… a ping-pong ball… a drunken gardener… With these slight clues to go on Detective-Inspector Bonaparte investigates the mysterious death of famous author, Mervyn Blake, who dies an agonising death late one night in his writing room.<br />But how did he die? No one knows. No one that is until Bony's acute observation of human nature uncovers the murderer – and the method used to kill Blake. One of the few Bonaparte mysteries not set in the outback, reveals Upfield at his best and most ingenious.<br /> <br /><i>Napoleon Bonaparte – my best detective.</i> – Daily Express

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On special assignment with Military Intelligence, Detective-Inspector Bonaparte leaves his familiar Australian outback environment for Melbourne and a nearby mountain resort. Although out of his element with city people, Bony displays his characteristic skills to interpret some puzzling clues in the search for a wily killer…<br /> <br /><i>The complex half-caste Bony is, I think, my favourite fictional detective of the past twenty years.</i> – Anthony Boucher, The New York Times

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A cypher that looked like a child's game of noughts-and-crosses; a strip of hessian bag; the rhythmic clanging sound of the turning windmill suddenly breaking the silence of the night; the minister who seemed out of place as a churchman: these were some of the more puzzling aspects of the case of the murdered swagman noticed by the keen eyes of Robert Burns, alias Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, alias &quot;Bony&quot;.<br /> <br /><i>Our distinctive student of violence arrives incognito at Merino, in western New South Wales, and, as a first move, provokes the local sergeant to lock him up. The method in Bony's madness is that while serving a semi-detention sentence and being made to paint the police station, he wears the best of all disguises… Here again is a first-rate Upfield mystery, made warm by humour, by the background characters and his portrayal of the natural background scene.</i> – The Age<br /> <br /><i>Upfield at his best.</i> – Adelaide News

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An intriguing case for Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte begins on a calm October day in an Australian seaside near Bermagui. Three men set out to sea for a day's fishing… and do not return. Despite intensive searches, no trace of the men or their boat is found, until, weeks later, a passing trawler hauls in a gruesome catch – the head of one of the missing fishermen. It is quite clear that its owner was murdered with a pistol shot. But by whom, and why, is for Bony to find out.<br /> <br /><i>A thriller with a new kind of thrill.</i> – Sheffield Morning Telegraph

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