Journalist and podcaster Andrew Rule brings us 18 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 '60s lingers in the nation's collective memory. The Easey Street murders symbolise a chilling assault on the freedom of young women in the '70s. The execution-style shooting of Gary Abdallah by a detective in the '80s 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.