Three of Australia’s most acclaimed nonfiction writers – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein –
discuss the Erin Patterson case and our collective obsession with her strange and terrible crime. When Patterson stood trial, accused of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, the court case gripped the nation and fascinated people all over the world. Together, the writers joined the daily media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts and spent long days immersed in the case’s sinister and complex themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.

The Mushroom Tapes is a true-crime book like no other — an unputdownable record of the writers’ private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. Speaking to Michael Williams, the three writers explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.