Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, is set to publish a new book in November about the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.
The book follows the story of Patterson, an Australian woman convicted in July of murdering three of her former in-laws and attempting to murder a fourth by serving them a beef wellington contaminated with death cap mushrooms in 2023. The case, which played out in an Australian court earlier this year, attracted global attention.
The Mushroom Tapes, written with fellow Australian authors Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published by Text Publishing on 11 November in Australia and W&N in the UK on 20 November. The case has already inspired a television special, a forthcoming ABC drama series and several documentaries.
Prosecutors alleged that Patterson, a mother and self-described true crime enthusiast, invited her estranged husband’s parents, Gail and Don Patterson, and Gail’s sister and brother-in-law, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, to lunch at her Victoria home in July 2023. Within days, three of the guests were dead and the fourth lay in a coma.
Patterson, 51, denied any intent to harm them, claiming she had bought the mushrooms from a grocer and discarded a food dehydrator that later tested positive for deadly toxins only out of panic. After an 11-week trial, a jury found her guilty of three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. She was sentenced in September to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years.
Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein were among the many writers, journalists and documentary teams who attended the trial. According to the publisher, The Mushroom Tapes emerged from their shared experience of “long days immersed in the case’s themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.” The book is described as a “true crime study like no other” and an exploration of both the crime and the public’s obsession with it.
Helen Garner’s work has often intertwined literature and the law. Her debut novel, Monkey Grip (1977), became an instant classic, while her later nonfiction – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief – cemented her reputation as a chronicler of Australia’s most fascinating court cases.
