For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson's preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell and spent countless hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.

The Mushroom Tapesis a true crime book like no other, an unputdownable record of the writers' private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. They 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.