"Detective-Inspector Bonaparte has never been better than in this baffling case of a killer who seemed to be picking off the town widows one by one. Bony arrived in Broome just after two well-to-do widows had been brutally strangled. The local police were short of help and completely stymied by a murderer who carefully left no clues. Bony pressed into service a Mr. Dickenson who combined the qualities of a gentleman, a scholar, and the town drunk. Then another widow was killed. But this time the murderer was just a little bit careless. Bony added two footprints, a beer bottle that hid petrol, a sound made by clicking teeth, three bundles of silk rags, and a passion for tidiness, and came up with a composite picture of the murderer. Then Bony staged a trap with the fourth widow as bait--and the stage was set to nab a vicious killer." - from the jacket of the 1949 Doubleday Crime Club edition

"Broome is a little sun-drenched town on the barren north-west coast of Australia; the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business, where all the little bungalows might be glass for all the secrets they could hide.... How then had the murderer of Broome's two most attractive widows got away without leaving a clue behind him? Who had strangled them, and left them naked in death?
That queerly named detective, Napoleon Bonaparte, sets slowly and surely to work, but has scarcley got going when a third widow meets the same horrid fate.... Had Napoleon met his Waterloo?... Nothing of the kind! For the next attempt was truly his Austerlitz, and he caught the very last person to be suspected en flagrant délit–in fact red-handed!" – from jacket of the 1972 Heinemann edition

"Two widows have already been murdered when Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (as Mr. Knapp, psychiatrist) comes to Broome. The murders seem to be without reason and apparently without clues. In his patient, meticulous manner, Bony collects infinitesimal facts and begins to build a picture of the murderer, but he becomes increasingly disturbed as the moon grows old and he feels that there might be another murder. A third murder is committed, but Bony has acquired enough facts to lay a trap for the murderer, avert the fourth crime, and expose the killer." – from "The Armchair Detective"

The Widows of Broome was first printed in the United State by the Doubleday Crime Club in 1949. The first British edition was printed by Heinemann in 1951. The Doubleday Crime Club edition is pictured above.