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  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9781740512084
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $19.99

A Child's Book of True Crime




In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student.

In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student.

As the young teacher's sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover's wife, has just published Murder At Black Swan Point, a true crime book about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress some years before, set in a nearby town. Kate becomes fixated on the unsolved crime of passion that occured years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.

Is it her imagination, or is someone stalking her? Is she caught playing a game where she no longer knows the rules? Has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?

Chilling, erotic and rivetingly suspenseful, A Child's Book Of True Crime marks the arrival of a powerful and startlingly original new voice.

'People don't make this kind of fuss for nothing. Hooper's novel is extraordinary...there's a confidence and imagination in the writing that you rarely see in a first novel.' Kerryn Goldsworthy, THE AUSTRALIAN

  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9781740512084
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

Chloe Hooper

Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2008) won the Victorian, New South Wales, West Australian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, as well as the John Button Prize for Political Writing, and a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. She is also the author of two novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement.

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