In a remote corner of the Australian Outback, that vast, empty territory in the center of the Australian continent, Police Constable Martin Stenhouse was found murdered in his Jeep, shot to death. Some clues at the murder scene seemed to indicate that Stenhouse had been killed by his Aboriginal tracker who had been traveling with Stenhouse. The tracker had disappeared. It looked as if it would be a fairly simple case.
Only, of course, it wasn't. Fortunately, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte - Bony to all of his friends - was on his way home from another case when his superiors asked if he would mind investigating Stenhouse's murder. And Bony, being Bony, immediately spotted clues at that murder scene which convinced him that the "official" version was not the correct version. And Bony realized that he wasn't the only one searching for a murderer. The local Aborigines, convinced that Stenhouse's tracker was also a victim, were also hunting for his killer.
That's what happens in Arthur Upfield's 1954 book called Sinister Stones; it has also been published under the title Cake in the Hatbox, and it's another adventure for DI Napoleon Bonaparte. It's the subject of my audio review this week for the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
If you’re not already a friend of Bony – or a fan of his creator, Arthur Upfield, who wrote about Bony in 29 books – let me tell you a little about the detective. He is the child of a white father and an Aboriginal mother and has inherited the best traits and abilities of both races. His father was unknown; his mother died two weeks after he was born. He was raised at a mission. He was given his name by a matron at the mission who saw the infant trying to eat a book about Napoleon. (There’s a good summary of that history on Wikipedia and more detail may be found on the Golden Age of Detection wiki, by the way.) He is a Detective Inspector in the police force of Queensland, Australia. His skills – especially his knowledge of the Australian outback and the vast deserts in the north and west of the continent – are phenomenal. We call him Bony because he always insists that his friends and family call him Bony (and, as he frequently says, he hopes we will become his friends too. He specializes in cold-case murders and related crimes in those hostile climates, and he is considered a master of tracking down criminals through his ability to read what he calls the Book of the Bush, the many tiny clues that are provided by nature. He is fiercely proud of his heritage and his job and boasts that he has never failed to, as he puts it, finalize a case.
All of this will be on display in Sinister Stones. It will be up to Bony, and his assistants, to discover the real story behind Stenhouse’s death – and the motives and secrets hidden in that vast wasteland of scrub brush and desert. It's a powerful story from a master storyteller. I believe all of the Bony books are currently in print, thanks to Upfield's family which has been re-releasing them, and I recommend Sinister Stones to you most highly.
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