Full credit for my awareness of Australian author June Wright has to go to Kate over at CrossExaminingCrime, who reviewed Wright’s debut Murder in the Telephone Exchange last year and made it sound fabulous.  Rather than re-evaluate that book, I thought I’d go for one of Wright’s later efforts and so find myself with this, her…well, it’s a little complicated placing this in the timeline.  Derham Groves’ excellent introduction informs us that Wright wrote this after her fourth book – making it, you’re correct, her fifth – but this 2015 imprint is in fact its first publication as it was rejected by two publishers, so therefore it’s her seventh book as it comes after the six she published.  Oh, except she also had another book rejected, too, but the manuscript for that has been lost, so this is…hang on…carry the one…well, work it out for yourselves.  And in the grand tradition of Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair and Hake Talbot’s vanished-from-history unnamed third novel, this joins my collection of “Seriously, this was rejected?” books that make one question precisely what or indeed if anyone was thinking at the time.

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