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

By: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein

Narrated by: Andrew Watson, Caroline Craig, Helen Garner Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

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.©2025 Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

Critic reviews

Extremely readable . . . Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein are an acute trio of conversational partners. Their precise, wry observations compel the reader's attention

A riveting true-crime conversation (Mia Levitin)

This is an utterly weird book which captures the fog and confusion of the world it enters, almost as a lark. It is brilliantly organised and the representation of the miasma of the trial is at such variance with so much we have imagined. Pick up this book and you'll find it hard to put down. It will be read around the world as a credible account of one of the strangest cases ever to come before a court. (Peter Craven)

An utterly absorbing exploration of how these writers think: questioning, rationalising and reflecting on female criminality, morality and the ethics of storytelling

I was utterly captivated . . . A dense and deeply engaging weaving of voices, narratives and ideas. A most enticing aspect of reading this book is the opportunity to eavesdrop on three highly intelligent and capable writers

In both their rhythm and register, these intimate conversations recall the forms that mediated Patterson's trial: podcasts, panel discussions, social media threads, group chats (Catriona Menzies-Pike)

Allows us to imagine what the mealtime conversations many of us have been having about this case would be like if three of Australia's best writers were guests. It's a comfort meal with some exotic ingredients mixed in

Sensitive and insightful

The Mushroom Tapes is clearly a hybrid, with pace and staying power: it benefits from the immediacy the recordings lend and the way the three authors bounce off each other, but has none of the excess detail that can bog down even the best-written account of some cases. (Jason Steger)

The Mushroom Tapes is a podcast on paper. That doesn't sound like something that should work, but it does. In a media ecosystem that is even more glutted with "murdertainment" than Orwell's tabloids were, it is a rare example of true crime that doesn't make you feel scummy for consuming it. More than that, it's insightful, humane and self-questioning about the ethics of its own project. (Sarah Ditum)

For what is ostensibly a true crime analysis (and, let me reassure you, if you're in the market for one, it is that, and a fascinating one), it is also much more in the way that only the very best true crime can be... So many moments that triggered and flickered, sparking synapses in my brain. So many observations that I'm sure will resonate with you. On witch hunts, on why so many women love true crime (hands up), on being an outsider and the need to belong, on female aggression and why society is so scared of it, on the stories we tell ourselves about how life is meant to be, how we cling to them, on marriage as an institution, why one person breaks and another doesn't

Insightful, humane and self-questioning