The Mushroom Tapes : Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial – from three of Australia’s finest writers, including the winner of the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize

In July 2023, in a quiet Australian country town, 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 Australian 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 uniquely enlightening study of Erin Patterson and our collective obsession with her strange and terrible crime.