June Wright: 5 books

The return of Maggie Byrnes, heroine of Murder in the Telephone Exchange. Maggie is married now, 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...

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...

The fourth in Dark Passage’s reissue series of crime mysteries by June Wright, 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...

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 “buttinski,” a piece of equipment...

Gaining an understanding of China's long and sometimes bloody history can help to shed light on China's ascent to global power. Many of China's imperial dynasties were established as the result of battle, from the chariot warfare of ancient times to the battles of the Guomindang (KMT) and Communist...