"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." - from the 1983 Scribner's edition

"Bony sets out to discover the reason for the death of young Raymond Gillen, who went swimming in the lake one hot moonlit evening and was never seen again. His twelve-thousand-dollar half-share of a lottery prize has also disappeared. Bony, accepted by Porchester as a horse-breaker, untangles a web of jealousies and hatreds among the men of the station and between Mrs. Fowler and her daughter Joan. The tension is high as the station hands and the two women watch the lake slowly but inexorably drying up. One night the house at Lake Otway (and Mrs. Fowler) goes up in a terrific blaze, and Bony is well on the way to clearing up the mystery." – from "The Armchair Detective"

Location: Porchester Station, near Ivanhoe, Lake Otway, NSW (fictional).

Death of a Lake was published by the Doubdleday Crime Club in America and by Heinemann in Britain in 1954. Pictured above is the Scribner's edition of 1983.