A few years ago in Australia, a woman called Erin Patterson killed three of her in-laws by inviting them to lunch and serving them beef Wellington containing death cap mushrooms. Her murder trial was held last year in country Victoria and attracted widespread media attention. Three Australian writers – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – attended the trial. This absorbing book is made of edited transcripts of their conversations about the details of the case and their day-to-day thoughts as the trial progressed.
I remember the case and the trial when it was in the news, but I wasn’t that interested – I never even bothered to find out whether Patterson had been found guilty. This book is really good though – they discuss enough detail that I got a really good handle on the trial, the evidence, and the witnesses and so on. But they also talk about random other people they meet at the trial and in the suddenly-crowded country town of Morwell. They also discuss the general public fascination with this kind of domestic crime.
The authors all come across as thoughtful and sympathetic, always interested in the stories behind the story. Their conversations are intelligent and perceptive and they bring their own experience to the discussions: Krasnostein is a lawyer as well as a writer, Hooper has written several true crime books, and Garner is just a very experienced, wide-ranging and highly-regarded writer. The conversations are endlessly engaging and are much more interesting than reading the news coverage at the time. I also enjoy how we see the story unfold in real time along with the authors. They earnestly discuss what might and might not happen, which witnesses might get called, and of course whether Patterson really did it. And of course they all have their own lives to live, so they aren’t always all there and we do get some sense of the relationships between the three.
Apparently these recordings were going to be a podcast series, but that plan fell through and they ended up publishing them in book form. Although I don’t normally go for podcasts, it would have been good to hear these three in their own voices. For now though, the book is excellent.