Customer Reviews

Death of a Lake (Scribner Crime Classics)

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I read this book five years ago and find it even more fascinating in a second reading.

The setting is Lake Otway on an Australian station of 800,000 acres and 60,000 sheep. This hauntingly beautiful lake dies from draught and reappears from floods every seventeen to twenty years. We see the lake on the third and last year of its current reincarnation. Water levels are dropping fast under the murderous summer sun.

The year before, a handsome young stockman named Ray Gillen took a moonlight swim and drowned. His body never surfaced. Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ("Bony") is not quite satisfied with this death. Gillen had a large sum of money stashed in his suitcase. His money disappeared with his body.

Bony shows up at Porchester Station posing as a horsebreaker. The stockmen see a quiet soft-spoken half-caste who's good with horses. But we readers know the real Bony, the relentless hunter who combines the cold rationality of the white race with the intuitive powers and tracking skills of the aborigine.

Cook and housemaid on the station are a gorgeous mother and daughter. The men are at each other's throats because of the women. And Bony soon discovers other tensions. Everyone is watching the shrinking lake and wondering what secrets it will reveal. And everyone is scheming after the missing money.

The human drama is played against the drama of the dying lake, which becomes a hellish nightmare of birds and animals fighting for water and dying in swarms.

There are scenes in this book you'll never forget. The searing heat of the sun lighting a match. Birds falling dead out of the trees. A stockman going mad as the temperature hits 120 degrees. I recommend every Inspector Bonaparte mystery, but this one is particularly powerful.