TRUE CRIME

Why has Adelaide, a beautiful city of churches and lush gardens and renowned for supporting the arts and culture, become better known as the epicentre of some of Australia’s weirdest and most brutal crimes?

One of its denizens seeks the answers in this fascinating investigation.

Some crimes are so mysterious or ghastly that they take on a legendary status, and Adelaide seems to have had more than its fair share of them. The whole nation remembers the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the ghastly Snowtown murders where the dismembered bodies were found in barrels in a disused bank vault, and the so-called Family murders perpetrated by Bevan Spencer van Einem, with its trail of conspiracy theories, rumour and innuendo, and other crimes just as notorious.

Award-winning novelist and journalist Stephen Orr rounds up the infamous crimes of his native city and looks beyond the myth to the tragic sadness, badness and madness of violent crime and its consequences.

pp. xviii, 270 illusts First Edition #260224