Wedderburn: A True Tale of Blood And Dust (True Crime) by Maryrose Cuskelly

Paperback:  The littlest thing can cause a fallout. - Gavan Holt, Councillor for Wedderburn Ward, Loddon Shire

What does it take to provoke a murder?

Wedderburn (2018) is the story of a grisly triple murder in Central Victoria in October 2014 - contemporary Australian true crime at its best.

One fine Wednesday evening in October 2014, 65-year-old Ian Jamieson secured a hunting knife in a sheath to his belt and climbed through the wire fence separating his property from that of his much younger neighbour Greg Holmes.  Less than 30 minutes later, Holmes was dead, stabbed more than 25 times.  Jamieson returned home and took two shotguns from his gun safe.  He walked across the road and shot Holmes' mother, Mary Lockhart, and her husband, Peter, multiple times before calling the police.

In this compelling book, Maryrose Cuskelly gets to the core of this small Australian town and the people within it.

Much like the successful podcast S-Town, things are not always as they seem: Wedderburn begins with an outwardly simple murder but expands to probe the dark secrets that fester within small towns, asking:  is murder something that lives next door to us all?

About the author:  Maryrose Cuskelly is a freelance writer and editor.  She is the author of two books, Original Skin: An exploration of the remarkable human hide (Scribe 2010) and The End of Charity: Time for social enterprise (Allen & Unwin 2008), which she wrote with Nic Frances, and was the winner of the Iremonger Award.  Her essays and articles have been published in a range of magazines, journals, and newspapers, including The Age, The Australian, The Melbourne Magazine, WellBeing, The Big Issue and RealTime.  Last year Maryrose won the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing (Non-fiction) for her essay 'Well Before Dark'.