Maidstone is found shot to death near Bore 10. The aborigine trackers can find no clue to the circumstances of his death, and it is some three weeks and many sand storms later that Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, alias Ed Bonnay, arrives to delve into the problem. Bony doesn't make much progress until he deliberately lets it slip that he is a policeman. This really stirs things up. Of course, Bony solves the mystery; does he ever fail? This is not quite as good as a completely Arthur U pfield tale; it drags in parts, but some chapters are very gripping.
Ray Gillen, lucky lottery winner of £12,500, went for a swim in Lake Otway one night and never came back. Now the lake is dying, the victim of drought, intense heat, and thirst-crazed animals. On one of the lake's lonely outposts, five men and two women watch as the water level drops, wondering what it might reveal of Gillen's body--and his missing money. And waiting with them is Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, who, posing as Bony the horsebraker, has set out to quietly investigate Gillen's death but has found himself drawn into a human drama as powerful as the natural one being played out before him.
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.
Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory
This is a fond look at J. B. Rhine and his colleagues and protégés in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, which, no longer affiliated with Duke University, lives on as the Rhine Research Center Institute for Parapsychology. Rhine and the lab were dedicated to scientific study and quantification of ESP and related phenomena. They got results such that, in the 1930s, the head of Duke’s psychology department declared Rhine’s work to be “the first hard evidence that the elusive proof of life after death might be out there.”
In recent years, the obituary has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in literary prestige and popularity with readers. As David Bowman, a distinguished Australian editor and journalist, says: 'In the English-speaking world, a newspaper of quality hardly seems complete these days without a regular obituary page.'
