The Mountains Have a Secret

This is the second of Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte novels I have read. This one is #12 in the series, and was published in 1952. Upfield is an interesting writer, British by birth, emigrated to Australia at the age of twenty. He fought in the Australian Army in WWI. Following the war he travelled extensively in Australia working with stock and farming and developed an understanding of the Aboriginal culture which was to inform much of his writing.

His ‘Bony' character is a Detective Inspector in the Queensland Police Force, and is of mixed parentage - his mother an Aboriginal and his father white. I mentioned in my review of the other Upfield novel that it is rare to have a mixed race Aboriginal character held in high regard, and protagonist of a series of books.

This novel is set in the Grampian Mountains area of Victoria, remote and thick with bush. Two young girls who were travelling through have disappeared - been missing for months, and a police officer who was sent to investigate was murdered, found with a bullet hole in his head, sitting in his car.

As seems to be the form for these books, ‘Bony' is sent in and given a free hand in how he deals with the investigation, trumping any local police, but still staying on-side with them. He adopts a cover story and goes under cover to stay at the remote hotel where the girls were last seen. He poses as a sheep farmer from New South Wales, and ingratiates himself with the hotel owners and staff, sniffing out the details of the disappearance and examining what makes the nearby sheep station so secretive with their high fences kept in such good order and routinely patrolled.

I won't share more plot outline, as it rolls out well enough in the book without me spoiling the flow.
There are other interesting characters throughout the story, and while it was quite a leisurely pace for the first three quarters of the book, based on having read only two, this seems to be the way Upfield builds suspense. The reader isn't always as well informed as ‘Bony' is, but eventually he shares his wisdom and starts to unravel the mysteries.

Enjoyable at 3.5 stars. I have another 3 or 4 of these stories to read in due course.