Bøger af June Wright

Uncover the emotional journey of one woman's search for love, acceptance, and the place where she truly belongs. Elise's life has been marked by a relentless pursuit of belonging. An adoptee who always felt like a second choice, she believed she had finally found her place when she fell in love with and married Evan. Little did she know that Evan carried his own powerful demons, ones that would nearly destroy her when she summoned the courage to confront them. The tragic aftermath left her overwhelmed by guilt and haunted by the past. Years later, a second chance may be Elise's path to happiness and a true sense of belonging. In a world filled with critical voices and daunting fears, she must make a life-altering choice: to embrace happiness or risk perpetuating the patterns that have haunted her for too long. Second Choices is a gripping narrative inspired by true events, offering a poignant, heartfelt, and hopeful account of Elise's relentless quest for belonging and a place to call home. This story touches on themes of adoption, miscarriage, verbal abuse, control, eating disorders, and the specter of suicide. Yet, at its core, it's a story of love, hope, and the unyielding human spirit's search for its rightful place in the world. Get your copy today and embark on a journey that will touch your heart and soul.

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 guest of honour at Maryhill College's annual reunion, she has a chance to dazzle her old tormentors the way she does her adoring television audience. But as she's holding court at the reunion tea party, old grudges and new jealousies swirl around her-and suddenly one of her tablemates drops dead, poisoned. Was Rianne the intended victim? She evidently thinks so-only that day she'd received a death threat. Rianne flees the scene and cannot be found. Who is the murderer? And what has happened to Rianne May? Fortunately, the school's principal is Mother Paul, who immediately calls for Detective Inspector Savage. She assisted him (or was it the other way around?) in solving a previous case (Faculty of Murder), and between them the unlikely pair will unravel this one too. But there will be more drama-and more deaths-before the murderer is uncovered. Moving between the brash new realm of television in the early 1960s and the cloistered atmosphere of a girls' convent school, Make-Up for Murder is the third and final Mother Paul novel and a must-read for all fans of June Wright's blend of intrigue, wit, and psychological suspense.

Mother Paul, June Wright¿s beloved nun-detective, returns to her sleuthing ways after she takes up a new position as warden of a student hall of residence at the University of Melbourne.No sooner has Judith Mornane arrived on campus than she startles her fellow residents by announcing her intention to discover the murderer of her sister, who disappeared from the same dorm a year earlier. The ever-curious Mother Paul is drawn to investigate what happened to Judith¿s sister¿did she simply run off for reasons best known to herself, as the police concluded, or could it be she really was murdered? Was her disappearance perhaps linked to a tragedy that happened at around the same time¿the accidental drowning (in her bathtub) of the wife of one of the college¿s professors? Was that drowning in fact as accidental as the official investigation suggested?Mother Paul believes the two events are connected somehow, and a further tragedy, the faked-suicide death of one of her student charges, convinces her that a particularly cruel and clever murderer is still at work within the college. She is not above a little subterfuge in the interest of discovering the truth and moves her colleagues, the students, and even the police around like so many figures on a chessboard until finally, amid high drama, the murderer is revealed.

June Wright''s most memorable detective, Mother Paul, might seem a bit otherworldly, but little escapes the kindly nun - she has a shrewd grasp of all that goes on in the hostel for young women she runs in 1950s Melbourne. The atmosphere is already strained by a spate of anonymous letters, when Mary Allen finds a stranger stabbed to death in the garden. Then one of the girls drowns, an apparent suicide, and the tension reaches fever pitch. Is there a connection between the two deaths and the letters? The police investigate, but Mother Paul pursues her own enquiries.

The Devil¿s Caress, originally published in 1952, is an 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 the restful weekend she was hoping for. As storms rage outside, the house on the cliff¿s edge seethes with hatred and tension, and two suspicious deaths soon follow. "Doubt is the devil¿s caress", one of the characters tells Marsh, as her resolute efforts to get to the bottom of the deaths force her to question everyone's motives, even those of Dr. Kate. This is a classic country house mystery with shades of Agatha Christie, but with the jagged emotional edge of Daphne du Maurier.

The return of Maggie Byrnes, heroine of Murder in the Telephone Exchange, finds her married, with a young son, and living in an outer Melbourne suburb. But violent death dogs her footsteps even in apparently tranquil Middleburn. It’s perhaps not that much of a surprise when widely disliked local bigwig James Holland (who also happens to be Maggie’s landlord) is shot, but Maggie suspects that someone is also trying to poison the infant who is his heir, and turns sleuth once more to uncover the culprits. First published in 1949, So Bad a Death is June Wright’s second novel, which she originally planned to call Who Would Murder a Baby? Her publishers demurred, but under any title it’s a worthy sequel to Murder in the Telephone Exchange. Novelist and crime fiction historian Lucy Sussex contributes an introduction to this reissue, which also includes a revealing interview she conducted with June Wright in 1996.

June Wright wrote this lost gem in the mid-1950s, but consigned it to her bottom drawer after her publisher foolishly rejected it. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time? Because while it’s a tour de force of the classic country-house murder mystery, it’s also a delightful romp, poking fun at the conventions of the genre. When someone takes advantage of a duck hunt to murder publisher Athol Sefton at a remote hunting inn, it soon turns out that virtually everyone, guests and staff alike, had a good reason for shooting him. Sefton’s nephew Charles thinks he can solve the crime by applying the “rules of the game” he’s absorbed from his years as a reviewer of detective fiction — only the killer evidently isn’t playing by those rules. Duck Season Death is a both a fiendishly clever whodunit and a marvelous entertainment.