Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, is set to publish a new book in November about the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.

The book follows the story of Patterson, an Australian woman convicted in July of murdering three of her former in-laws and attempting to murder a fourth by serving them a beef wellington contaminated with death cap mushrooms in 2023. The case, which played out in an Australian court earlier this year, attracted global attention.

The Mushroom Tapes, written with fellow Australian authors Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published by W&N on 20 November. The case has already inspired a television special, a forthcoming ABC drama series and several documentaries.

Prosecutors alleged that Patterson, a mother and self-described true crime enthusiast, invited her estranged husband’s parents, Gail and Don Patterson, and Gail’s sister and brother-in-law, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, to lunch at her Victoria home in July 2023. Within days, three of the guests were dead and the fourth lay in a coma.

Patterson, 51, denied any intent to harm them, claiming she had bought the mushrooms from a grocer and discarded a food dehydrator that later tested positive for deadly toxins only out of panic. After an 11-week trial, a jury found her guilty of three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. She was sentenced in September to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years.

Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein were among the many writers, journalists and documentary teams who attended the trial. According to the publisher, The Mushroom Tapes emerged from their shared experience of “long days immersed in the case’s themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.” The book is described as a “true crime study like no other” and an exploration of both the crime and the public’s obsession with it.

Helen Garner’s work has often intertwined literature and the law. Her debut novel, Monkey Grip (1977), became an instant classic, while her later nonfiction – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief – cemented her reputation as a chronicler of Australia’s most fascinating court cases.

Bestselling crime writer James Patterson and investigative journalist Vicky Ward are writing a book on the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, while actor Dave Franco said this week that he would be “open” to playing accused murderer Luigi Mangione in a biopic if one were to be made.

Mangione is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Thompson, who was shot and killed in Manhattan on 4 December last year.

“This is a story about the American Dream Gone Wrong,” said Patterson in a statement on the book, which does not yet have a title or release date. “It’s also a story of one young man’s descent from Ivy League graduate to notorious accused killer to so-called political martyr.”

Mangione, 27, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of murder, using a weapon with a silencer, and two counts of stalking. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said earlier this year that she had directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

“Like millions around the world, Vicky and I were riveted by coverage of the five-day manhunt from Midtown Manhattan to Altoona, Pennsylvania,” Patterson said. Mangione was eventually arrested in a McDonald’s.

“This story touches all of us,” said Ward. “It goes to the heart of the social, cultural and political issues dividing the US right now. Nothing is more of a reviled black box than the health insurance industry, and it’s time to open it up, through a crime that has caught the attention of the country.”

The book will be published by Little, Brown in the US, which also published The Idaho Four, Patterson and Ward’s recent book on the murder of four students.

The news comes in the same week that Franco said he would be open to playing Mangione in a biopic when asked on the talkshow Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen on Tuesday. “No one has approached me about it yet, I’ll say that … More people in my life reached out about this exact thing than anything else that has ever happened. Let’s just say I am open if it’s the right people, and let’s leave it at that.”

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After the shooting, Mangione gained an avalanche of support on social media. The online fandom has sparked criticism for glorifying an alleged murderer. “The suspect, who police now believe to be Mangione, was a fit young man and I think it’d be mistaken to overlook the degree that likely propelled the story,” Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told the Guardian in December.

“The other feature of Mangione is one that plays an outsized role in every single point of American life: his race,” wrote Ben Makuch in the Guardian at the time. “If he were Black or Latino, this story would likely have played out very differently.”

Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock knew the power of a meal gone fatally wrong. From poisoned tarts to deadly dinner parties, their murder mysteries had the knack of transforming the domestic into the diabolical.

Now, real life has delivered its own gothic culinary thriller – and the literary and entertainment worlds are eating it up.

The conviction of Erin Patterson, the Victorian woman found guilty of murdering three members of her estranged husband’s family – and attempting to murder a fourth – with a homemade beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, has created an international media maelstrom. Publishing houses, streaming platforms, film studios and podcast producers are circling the story like salivating wolves closing in to make a killing.

Even before the jury delivered its guilty verdict on Monday, Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC, confirmed it was turning the Patterson poisoning into a TV drama. Its co-creator Tony Ayres (The Survivors, Clickbait) told Deadline that Toxic would “go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just sensationalise”, and he was working closely with the ABC journalist Rachael Brown, co-podcaster of Mushroom Case Daily, the ABC’s most successful podcast in a decade.

It is one of some half a dozen podcasts that covered the murder trial daily, with reporters from around the world flocking to the Latrobe Valley law courts.

These podcast series are now expected to delve deeper into the forensic science behind mushroom toxicity, the ethics of food preparation, and the cultural fascination with domestic crime.

This Sunday, Seven is promising a Spotlight Special, with a criminal barrister, a forensic psychologist, a former detective, and journalists dissecting the trial and the convicted poisoner’s motives.

And Nine has confirmed a deal with its streaming platform Stan for Death Cap, a documentary that Screen Australia promises will showcase “exclusive access into the investigation and trial” and examine “how one lethal lunch can shatter the myth of small-town security in Australia”.

Comparisons to the 2004 Netflix hit The Staircase, based on the true case of Michael Peterson, an American novelist accused of murdering his wife who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their North Carolina home in 2001, abound.

Toni Collette who played the victim in The Staircase, is being touted on social media as an ideal actor to play Patterson.

New Idea threw local names Magda Szubanski, Mandy McElhinney and Jacki Weaver into the mix, along with Hollywood heavyweights Melissa McCarthy and Kathy Bates, and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning.

With one of Australia’s most lauded novelists Helen Garner spotted in the Morwell court public gallery, there has been speculation that another gripping work of nonfiction, along the lines of This House of Grief, her 2014 work about the trial of Robert Farquharson, convicted of crashing his car into a dam and killing his three sons, is in the works.

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And Allen & Unwin has already announced it will publish The Mushroom Murders, a nonfiction work by the Underbelly creator Greg Haddrick – “with details not previously published” – in November. On Wednesday, Hachette Australia announced it had acquired world rights for Recipe for Murder, authored by Duncan McNab.

With global media outlets including CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera covering the verdict, the story’s reach has been unprecedented for an Australian criminal case.

“It resonated with an audience all over the world,” the UK Daily Mail journalist Caroline Cheetham, who gained a cult following with her The Trial Of Erin Patterson podcast, told the ABC.

“It just feels so totally off the wall, bizarre, crazy, bonkers.”

With so many spin-off projects already confirmed, the Erin Patterson saga may now become one of the most dramatised true crime stories in recent memory.

Whether ethical questions, about how the tragic deaths of Gail and Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson have become entertainment fodder, will be examined remains to be seen.