Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonapart, a half-cast Australian, isn’t your average detective. He goes by Bony and has an eye for details. When necessary, he can pull from his Aboriginal heritage for needed abilities.

Two girls went missing a couple of months ago, and a policeman a short while later. Bony is called in to see if he can figure out what is going on and possibly locate the missing people.

Staying at the hotel the girls left from, Bony uncovers very little but does fee something more is going on beneath the façade that is presented. The owner is a well-trained organist who periodically has secretive gatherings where he performs along with strange rituals. The hotel owner’s father is in ill health and appears terrified of his son. A talking parrot, who utters strange phrases and a knife-throwing American rounds out the characters at the hotel.

Bony leaves the hotel, but takes up residence in the nearby bush country, to be able to watch over the hotel in hopes of learning more about the missing girls and man and what it is that is being hidden.

Written in 1948, there are allusions to what occurred during WWII. Missing people, strange visitors to the hotel and strange and secretive goings on provide threads to be explored in order to find out what truly is going on and what happened to the missing girls in this rural area.

Bony is an interesting character in the way he investigates and the way he observes peoples’ actions and his surroundings. A bit like Sherlock Holmes. ( )

Strictly this is just after World War 2. Two young women hikers are killed after staying at a remote hotel in the mountains. Bony investigates and discovers a plot to carry on Nazism. It strikes me as rather improbable --there are plenty of "Nazi revival" thrillers (Let the TIger Die, for instance, or even The Boys from Brazil) but most of them are set in more likely places than Australia. ( )

Méticuleux et rocambolesque... ( )

Takes time to get going but provides the requisite atmosphere of the general menace of the rural space and most of its inhabitants familiar from a whole line of narratives in which surviving outside the city calls for special skills. The mystery behind the murders is wildly improbable but speaks with the telling urgency of popular culture to the cultural moment when it was written, in the early 1950s.

Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte takes on another cold case in the Grampian Mountains in Western Victoria, Australia. The mountains hide the mystery the disappearance of two young female hikers four months before Bony sets out to find their trail.

A detective sent to solve the case is found dead in his car 25 miles from where the women disappeared. Bony picks up the trail at a pub where the girls were last scene. In an Upfield novel that contains more violence than other books in the series, Bony shows great patience is searching for clues to solve the mystery.

A good read with a somewhat implausible ending. ( )