Australian Media Hall of Fame 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.