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