Catching up with true crime reading meant I also had to pick up LIFE & CRIMES by Andrew Rule. A different tone from his sometime writing partner, John Silvester, Rule's style is more, I don't know, measured. Certainly he's less inclined towards calling a spade a bloody shovel, but instead applies a forensic, detailed and dispassionate telling whilst still managing to achieve a readable, pacey style of narrative.
Reading this one at the time that I did had a particularly poignant overlay as the story of the Easey Street murders is included, at the same time as the announcement of the location of a suspect for that crime overseas (he's since been deported back to Australia to stand trial for 2 counts of murder, 1 of rape). Eighteen stories in all in this collection, going right back to the Beaumont children, through to some of the cases in the '80s that started to raise a lot of questions about gang activity.
Life & Crimes
Journalist and podcaster Andrew Rule brings us eighteen Australian crime stories that have fuelled fears, fired outrage and broken hearts and dreams. Among them are events so infamous that a word or phrase propels us back to a time and place. The disappearance of the Beaumont children from an Adelaide beach in the sixties lingers in the nation's collective memory. The Easey Street murders symbolise a chilling assault on the freedom of young women in the seventies. The execution-style shooting of Gary Abdallah by a detective in the eighties heightened suspicions about the twinned worlds of cops and criminals. The author has covered crime for decades with a novelist's eye and forensic attention to truth, and lived to tell the tales. These are the best of them.
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