June Wright

Age range 12+ Faculty of Murder introduces Mother Paul, June Wright's beloved nun-detective, who returns to her sleuthing ways after taking up a new position as warden of a student hall of residence at the University of Melbourne. Upon her arrival on campus, Judith Mornane startles her fellow residents by announcing her intention to uncover the truth behind her sister's...

Mother Paul, the incomparable nun-detective, is faced with her most perplexing case when a former pupil at her convent school is murdered at their annual reunion. As a schoolgirl, Maisie Ryan was often bullied by her peers, but a decade later, she's a TV star, the glamorously renamed Rianne May. When she's invited to be the guest of honour at...

First published in 1948, when it was the best-selling mystery of the year in the author's native Australia, Murder in the Telephone Exchange stars feisty young operator Maggie Byrnes. When one of her more unpopular colleagues is murdered—her head bashed in with a 'buttinsky,' a piece of equipment used to listen in on phone calls—Maggie resolves to turn sleuth. Narrated...

June Wright was mostly forgotten until the reissue last year of her 1948 bestseller Murder in the Telephone Exchange (also available from Turnaround), when a new generation of readers fell in love with her blend of intrigue, wit, and suspense – and her sharp-eyed, outspoken sleuth, Maggie Byrnes. In this sequel, So Bad a Death, Maggie is living in the...

The fourth in Dark Passage's reissue series of crime mysteries by June Wright, The Devil's Caress, originally published in 1952, is a tense psychological thriller set on the wild southern coast of the Mornington Peninsula, outside Melbourne. Overworked young medico Marsh Mowbray has been invited to the country home of her revered mentor, Dr. Kate Waring, but it's far from...

A fresh twist on the classic country-house mystery that is also a brilliant sendup of the genre. When publisher Athol Sefton is shot at a remote hunting lodge, it turns out almost everyone, guests and staff, had good reason to murder him. Sefton's nephew Charles thinks he can solve the crime by applying the traditional 'rules of the game' he's...

June Wright had already published three popular mysteries by the time she created her most memorable detective, the Reverend Mother Mary St Paul of the Cross. The kindly Mother Paul may seem vague and otherworldly, but little escapes her attention—she has a shrewd grasp of everything that's going on beneath the surface. In Reservation for Murder, the first of three...