"When Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte arrived at the Baden Park Hotel in the Grampian mountains of Australia, he ran into something a lot more serious than the simple disappearance of two young women hikers. Curiosity about the missing girls could be unhealthy; a police detective who had been on the case was murdered. And then, too, Bony found the situation at the hotel a little distorted. The landlord's father, an elderly alcoholic, obviously lived in fear of his son, and seemed anxious to tell his own version of the strange goings on. Bony soon felt a bigger evil beneath the surface, and in a startling dénouement the canny half-aboriginal detective finds himself face to face with the shocking secret." - from the jacket of the 1970 Angus & Robertson edition

"When a policeman sent to investigate the disappearance of two pretty girl hikers turns up murdered, Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte pays a visit to the remote hotel in the Grampian Mountains where the girls were last seen. There the suave, organ-playing proprietor, his strange terrified father, an ex-U.S. paratrooper with a penchant for knife throwing, and a talking parrot involve Bony in the most bizarre adventure of his career." - from the 1985 Collier edition

"Detective-Inspector Bonaparte visits the Baden Park Hotel in the guise of a sheep farmer on vacation in order to find out the fate of two young Australian girls who had been hiking and were known to be well able to take care of themselves. Some weeks after the disappearance, young Detective Price out searching for them is found shot dead in his car. Bony doles out small drinks of whiskey to the elder invalid Simpson in return for what information he can give. The younger Simpson, Jim, owner of Baden Park Hotel, is a cold man, though an excellent organist, often heard playing on a large expensive organ brought from Germany for him by his wealthy friend Carl Benson. Carl and his sister Cora live behind high barbed-wire fences and electrically operated gates–ostensibly to protect their valuable breeding sheep–but Bony senses a more sinister set-up. Glen Shannon, an American, is yard man at the hotel. He has a personal interest in Bony's investigation." – from "The Armchair Detective"

The Mountains have a Secret was printed in 1948 by the Doubleday Crime Club and in Britiain by Heinemann in 1952. The 1985 Collier edition is pictured above.