Showing results by narrator "Peter Hosking" in All Categories

Paul Desmond admires his close friend George Harlequin for his impeccable European breeding. Head of a prestigious Swiss bank, Harlequin belongs to a vanishing class of gentlemen whose handshake is their bond. Then their gilded world is blown apart. A computer printout identifies the Harlequin et Cie bank as the target of a gigantic takeover. The mastermind is Basil Yanko, a ruthless financial genius whose instruments are fraud, blackmail and terror. As the conflict moves from Zurich to London, New York and Mexico, Harlequin must become a 'villain by necessity'.

An intriguing case for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte begins on a calm October day in an Australian seaside town. 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 bullet. But by whom, and why, is for Bony to find out.

This is the 22nd instalment in Mr. Upfield’s detective series featuring the Australian Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Deep in Australia's outback, a woman has been murdered, her daughter vanished. Yorky, one of the locals and a crazy wanderer, is known to have been in the area, and his footprints have been identified near the body. When he too disappears, even the Aboriginal trackers are baffled. Bony's approach changes everything....

Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn’t usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple’s suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law, Greg, has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places - and low. Harry can’t get officially involved in Greg’s murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'.

A standalone novel from the author of the classic Australian Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte mystery series. Harry Tremayne, a policeman, goes to an isolated valley in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia to find his brother - who vanished a month earlier while investigating the murder of a police detective. Do the gold smugglers at Breakaway House hold the answers to the mystery? First published as a serial in the Perth Daily News in 1932, the real setting for Breakaway House is Mt Magnet, about 580km north of Perth, deep in gold country.

Jack Anderson was a big man with a foul temper, a sadist and a drunk. Five months after his horse appeared riderless, no trace of the man has surfaced and no one seems to care. But Bony is determined to follow the cold trail and smoke out some answers.

The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of 'Venom House'. Perhaps that's because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, the treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aborigines slaughtered by Answerth ancestors. Or perhaps it's just because the Answerth household is such a strange one.

Mr. Jelly's Business is one of the finest of Arthur Upfield's many distinguished stories about the career of Detective Inspector Napoleon ("Bony") Bonaparte. It takes Bony to the West Australian town of Burracoppin to investigate the disappearance of George Loftus, whose car was found wrecked near the longest fence in the world, the 1,500 mile Rabbit Fence. He meets Loftus's wife, who is anything but grief-stricken at her husband's disappearance; Loftus's hired man, singularly reticent about his own past history; and many of Burracoppin's numerous gossips.

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?

An Inspector Bonaparte Mystery. An extraordinary case for Detective-Inspector Napolean Bonaparte opens when a police car is bombed from the air on a lonely outback road by a mysterious pilot who plans to conquer a nation. The trail through the Land of Burning Water tests Bonys endurance to the limit and takes the detective as close to death as he has ever been.

It's September 1957, two days before the VFL grand final, and Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, former bomber pilot and ex-POW, finally has some time off. But there's no rest for Charlie, a decent but damaged man still troubled by his wartime experiences. A recently widowed friend asks a favour and he's dropped into something a hell of a lot bigger than he bargained for when he discovers a Melbourne funeral parlour has been burying bodies with parts missing.

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 agonizing death late one night in his writing room. 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.

The nude body of a man is discovered entombed in the walls of Split Point Lighthouse on the South-East Coast of Australia. Investigating the crime Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, wonders why a coffin is moved at night, who was the girl struggling with Dick Lake on the cliff top, and what caused the Bully Buccaneers to deal in death. Superintendent Bolt said, 'It's the toughest job we've ever had to bash open.' An ordinary policeman could afford to fail, but Bony never....

Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World Is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: ‘A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name. What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some 20 years ago, she had committed a murder.’ Jung’s encounter with the woman had an explosive effect on him and brought him very close to total breakdown.

Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.

Tucked away in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is Cork Valley, inhabited by hard-drinking Irishmen. Here an Excise Officer looking for illicit whiskey 'stills' has been murdered, and it's Bony's job to find the killer. Disguised as a horse thief, the Aboriginal detective hitchhikes into the valley to meet a lawless lot....

Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is called to the drought-stricken outback for this, his latest case. At a desolate sheep station, two men have been savagely beaten to death, and it's Bony's job to make an arrest. This isn't an easy case, since clues are scarce in this sun-baked, sand-blown country, but Bony's understanding of the bush and the people who live there – both black and white – leads him inexorably to the killer.

Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle. Or maybe not so quiet.

Martin Carter is having a crook day. His home life's a misery, he's been retrenched by the bank, and everyone's forgotten his birthday. But a million-dollar payroll, a pistol, and a split-second decision change everything. Hurtling north on a motorcycle with the intriguing Faith, Martin encounters a mysterious hit-man, a new-age bike gang, a reclusive media mogul, and the booby-trapped mountain hideout of an old schoolmate.

An Italian general is found dead in his apartment. Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames. Is it suicide or murder? Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation that leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general’s former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful onetime spy.