Verse Chorus Press

SYDNEY, 1959. Billy Glasheen is flogging mailorder schemes out of a seedy back room in Chinatown. Want to play guitar in 14 days? Learn Italian in your spare time? Win big with an infallible betting system? Master the love secrets of the ancients? Bill’s your man.

But there are unsettled accounts in Billy’s past, and they’re coming due. As shadowy factions line up around him, he can’t be sure if he’s the target or caught in someone else’s crossfire. Or is he imagining the whole thing? Finally an ultimatum is delivered: come up with a small fortune in hush money, or cop a bullet and a shallow grave. Six months, and the clock is ticking.

It’s time to call in all debts and favours, but right when he needs them most, Bill’s old gang of beatniks, bandits, and hoochie coochie girls seem to have made themselves strangely scarce. He’s on his own.

Amaze Your Friends is a dark, wild ride through a city of easy money and sudden falls, of high times and hangovers, of jukebox rock’n’roll and the lowdown flophouse blues.

SYDNEY, 1959. Billy Glasheen is flogging mailorder schemes out of a seedy back room in Chinatown. Want to play guitar in 14 days? Learn Italian in your spare time? Win big with an infallible betting system? Master the love secrets of the ancients? Bill’s your man.

But there are unsettled accounts in Billy’s past, and they’re coming due. As shadowy factions line up around him, he can’t be sure if he’s the target or caught in someone else’s crossfire. Or is he imagining the whole thing? Finally an ultimatum is delivered: come up with a small fortune in hush money, or cop a bullet and a shallow grave. Six months, and the clock is ticking.

It’s time to call in all debts and favours, but right when he needs them most, Bill’s old gang of beatniks, bandits, and hoochie coochie girls seem to have made themselves strangely scarce. He’s on his own.

Amaze Your Friends is a dark, wild ride through a city of easy money and sudden falls, of high times and hangovers, of jukebox rock’n’roll and the lowdown flophouse blues.

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, 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.