In July 2023, in the quiet Gippsland town of Leongatha, Erin Patterson—stay-at-home mother and true-crime devotee—invited her husband’s devoutly Christian family to lunch. Within days, three of her guests were dead and the fourth was in a coma. They had all been poisoned by death cap mushrooms.

Two years later, 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.

Among those drawn into the drama were three renowned writers: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.

Together, they 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—a unique study of Erin Patterson and our collective obsession with her strange and terrible crime.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham–Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, The Season and How to End a Story: Collected Diaries.

Chloe Hooper is acclaimed for her compelling narratives in both fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of A Child’s Book of True Crime, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Literature, the multi-award-winning The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire and Bedtime Story. She has won three Walkley awards.

Sarah Krasnostein is the bestselling author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer. Her prizes include the Victorian Prize for Literature and Walkley awards for both long-form feature writing and arts criticism. She holds a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to practise law in New York and Victoria.