Mrs Mort's Madness

True crime stories are gripping, especially when the grisly details of the crime are matched by lashings of romance, passion and tragedy. Author Suzanne Falkiner combines the conventions of good investigative writing and biography with 'imaginative reconstruction' to create a captivating account of this true crime that examines the tragedy behind the headline-grabbing event. Thorough research enables her to draw rich and colourful portrayals of all the characters, mapping their interconnected and claustrophobic social connections and revealing the discreet decadence beneath the respectable social veneer. -- Kaye Donovan * U: Magazine * Ultimately, Falkiner does not promote a particular view as to whether Ms Mort was actually mad at the time she killed her lover, or just 'a woman spurned'. However, the options she raises with subtlety and sensitivity are tantalising, real questions about whether Ms Mort's homicidal conduct was the result of psychotic illness or premeditatedly murderous behaviour, camouflaged by feigned mental illness. Mrs Mort's Madness is absorbing reading for a rainy day. -- Ian Freckleton QC * Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law * A valuable addition the genre of Australian true crime writing. -- Mark Tedeschi Mrs Mort's Madness comes with a skilled writer's passion for impressive research and digging up a good yarn. Suzanne Falkiner has the right balance of fact, supposed history and storytelling enabling the characters to tell their side of the mystery in their own voice. A sizzler. -- Warren Fahey * The Sydney Morning Herald * 'Suzanne Falkiner's Mrs Mort's Madness is not a cricket book: it is a carefully assembled but highly readable account of a sensational crime. ... Nearly a century after it transfixed Sydney, Suzanne has at last rounded the story out.' Gideon Haigh