Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? When Bony noticed something odd in the background of a police photograph, he begins to piece together the secrets of the sands of Windee. Here is the original background to the infamous Snowy Rowles murder trial. Napoleon Bonaparte my best detective. - Daily Mail

The discovery of a stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things for different folks. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill meant renewed purpose in life. For Dr Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For some it meant a murder plan gone awry, and for Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career. Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives. - BBC

Somewhere within Arthur Upfield's travelling dray were the clues to uncovering three acts of murder involving the grifter, Snowy Rowles. Once Upfield had published his crime thriller, The Sands of Windee, West Australian police gave chase, starting with the esteemed author of Bony...

The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of Venom House - perhaps because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aboriginals slaughtered by the Answerth ancestors. Whatever the reason, most people are content to give Venom House and its occupants a wide berth... until a couple of corpses turn up in the lake... The strength of Upfield's accomplishment in this book is so overwhelming it makes the reader cower. The characters are well-developed, the conversation vernacular for the Australian outback, and the development compelling. The story is the nearest Upfield comes to a story that would have made Edgar Allen Poe envious, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing... The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

Murder down under. The car lies wrecked and abandoned near the world's longest fence, the "rabbit-proof fence" in the wheat belt of Western Australia. There is no sign of its owner. Has George Loftus simply decamped, for reasons of his own? Or was it murder? Bonaparte suspects the worst and is determined to find the body - and the murderer.

Jeffrey Anderson was a big man with a foul temper - a sadist and an ugly drunk. When his horse The Black Emperor, an animal as mean as its owner, came home riderless, no one cared. And no one cared when no trace of the man could be found. But five months later, Detective-Inspector Bonaparte is called in - and he is determined to solve the mystery. With his usual tenacity he takes up the cold trail. What happened to Anderson, to his hat, to his stockwhip, to his horse's neck-rope? Bony must rely on his eyes and his wits to help him find the answers, for the local inhabitants, both black and white, are keeping their own secrets. Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives - BBC

Sand, Wind, and War records the work, travels and adventures of one of the last of the great British explorers, a man who served in both world wars and carved out a special niche in science through his studies of desert sands. Ralph Alger Bagnold was born in 1896 into a military family and educated as an engineer. Posted to Egypt in 1926, he was one of a group of officers who adapted Model T Fords to desert travel and in 1932 made the first east-west crossing—6,000 miles—of the Libyan desert. Bagnold established such a name for himself that in World War II he was again posted to Egypt where he founded and trained the Long Range Desert Group that was to confound the German and Italian armies. Bagnold’s fascination with the desert included curiosity over the formation of dunes, and beginning in 1935 he conducted wind tunnel experiments with sand that led to the book The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. Eventually, he was to see his findings called on by NASA to interpret data on the sands of Mars. He devoted subsequent research to particle flow in fluids, and also served as a consultant to Middle Eastern governments concerned with the interference of sand flow in oil drilling. Sand, Wind, and War is the life story of a man who not only helped shape events in one part of the world but also contributed to our understanding of it. It is a significant benchmark not only in the history of science, but also in the annals of adventure.