Winds of Evil

The incomparable Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is back--and now he must solve one of his most baffling cases. When Bony sets out to investigate two bizarre murders at Wirragatta Station deep in the Australian outback, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent is now cold, and any surviving clues have been confused by a bumbling policeman. As Bony gets closer to the trail, the mysterious murderer sets out to stop him. Can Bony stop the killer first?

Mr. Jelly's Business

Bony is the sort of detective who enjoys nothing better on a holiday than a little informal investigation. When he agrees to help a colleague in the matter of the disappearance of George Loftus, a farmer whose car was found wrecked near the world's longest fence in the wheat country of western Australia, he cannot immediately find evidence of the murder he suspects. Loftus's wife seems concerned about him, but his handsome hired man is an enigma. It is not until Bony becomes absorbed in the second mystery of Mr. Jelly, an amateur criminologist who himself often disappears on secret business, that he finds the key to the strange goings-on in this seemingly ordinary farming community.

Wings above the Diamantina

A red mooplane stolen from a flying circus is found the next day on a dried up lake bed nearly two hundred miles away. The unknown young woman in the passenger seat is alive and conscious but totally paralysed. The pilot is missing, but without any tracks showing that he left the machine after landing. It seems a situation from the world of nightmare. This extraordinary case takes Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-caste detective, to an outback cattle station in western Queensland. There, in a race against time, Bony sets out to unravel the bewildering puzzle, with the help of an old aboriginal chief.

The Sands of Windee

No white man would have noticed the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an bandoned car, but the message he read there told Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station was anything but accidental. To the infallible Bony, small, almost unimportant things were a tremendous help in this case: the ants out in the scrub country moving stones to warm the eggs in their nest showed him a cut sapphire buried in the earth; in a place where silver would not occur naturally he found a small disc of silver plate; and then a boot nail came to light where he had hoped it would be.

The Barrakee Mystery

The Barrakee Mystery is the first of Upfield's Inspector Bonaparte mysteries. Bony is introduced as he travels to Barrakee station, a large homestead in the Darling River basin, to investigate the death of King Henry, a local aborigine leader. The wealthy and successful owner of Barrakee station had a gracious wife, a beautiful niece, and a son returning from college. Two things marred John Thornton's happiness: an unresolved argument concerning his son, and the murder of King Henry. When Detective-Inspector Bonaparte arrived, the peaceful Station suddenly erupted--as long-kept secrets were laid bare, and easy-going people turned to violence.