My review of A Recipe for Murder, by Duncan Mcnab

A Recipe for Murder

by Duncan Mcnab

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The 2023 Erin Patterson mushroom murder case gripped not just Australia but the world, spawning months of newsreel, podcasts and online debate, attracting near comparable public attention to the 1982 Lindy Chamberlain case. 

So, it seems right and natural that this author, an old hand at true crime, should attend the court hearings and research the town of Leongatha, Patterson's family and history, with his usual expertise.

It has often been said there's a peculiar intimacy to crimes that happen in kitchens: the choreography of hands, the small rituals of preparation, the way ordinary gestures can be turned into instruments. 

Duncan McNab’s A Recipe for Murder takes that intimacy and tilts it until the familiar becomes uncanny, tracing a case where domestic routine and lethal intent meet with devastating clarity. 

The book reads like a slow, precise unpeeling of a life — layer by layer — until the raw, exposed truth is left trembling on the page.

McNab writes with the authority of someone who has spent years watching how investigations unfold. He reconstructs scenes with a reporter’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s ear for the telling detail: the texture of a sauce, the smell of mushrooms, the small, almost accidental choices that accumulate into motive and method. 

These sensory particulars do more than decorate the narrative; they become the book’s moral compass, guiding the reader through the ordinary textures of family life toward the extraordinary consequences that follow when trust is weaponised.

The hush of the kitchen — the clink of a spoon, the slow slide of a lid, steam fogging a window — is a recurring motif, and McNab uses it to remarkable effect. He lingers on domestic minutiae not as filler but as evidence: grocery lists, recipes, polite exchanges at the dinner table are all clues in a human drama. 

In his hands the kitchen becomes a stage where motive and method are both cooked and consumed, and the reader learns to read the ordinary as if it were a ledger of intent.

What distinguishes McNab’s account is its restraint. He resists the sensational turn that so often marks true-crime retellings, preferring instead a cool patience. The legal machinery — the police work, the forensic tests, the courtroom choreography — is laid out with clarity and respect for complexity, never reduced to melodrama. 

This measured approach allows the human elements to breathe: grief, denial, the small hypocrisies and loyalties that complicate any neat assignment of guilt. The result is a narrative that feels both rigorous and humane.

Characterisation is subtle rather than theatrical. McNab sketches the people involved with an economy that trusts the reader to fill in the spaces: the accused are not monsters on a stage but people whose ordinary habits and private resentments become legible under scrutiny. 

Victims, jurors, lawyers and investigators are rendered as fallible, complicated beings rather than mere archetypes. 

This humane restraint deepens the moral ambiguity at the heart of the story: culpability is not a single, bright line but a series of shadows and reflections.

The book balances procedural chronology with intimate domestic vignettes, and that alternation keeps the narrative taut. McNab’s prose is spare and precise; he lets scenes accumulate rather than insisting on rhetorical flourish. 

The legal passages are lucid without being dry, and the procedural detail never overwhelms the human story. There is a clear respect for the reader’s intelligence throughout: the book explains what must be explained and leaves the rest to the reader’s imagination.

McNab’s attention to texture is one of the book’s most haunting qualities. He lingers over the sensory — the smell of mushrooms, the way a sauce thickens, the tactile certainty of a knife in the hand — and these details become instruments of suspense. They do not merely set scene; they map motive. 

The ordinary becomes ominous because McNab shows how easily domestic acts can be repurposed into instruments of harm. That transformation is the book’s central, chilling insight.

The narrative’s coolness is a deliberate choice that often serves the subject. A crime executed with clinical deliberation is best examined with a steady hand, and McNab has it. 

Yet there are moments when this very steadiness can feel like distance. The refusal to indulge melodrama is admirable, but occasionally a sharper emotional edge might have made the stakes feel more immediate. Even so, the restraint is more often an asset, mirroring the methodical nature of the investigation and the quiet, bureaucratic rhythms of the courtroom.

McNab’s reporting is patient and measured. He reconstructs the meals, the markets, the small decisions that accumulate into catastrophe, and he does so without the breathless cadence of tabloid retelling. 

Instead, the book offers a steady accumulation of small facts and human moments that, together, form a convincing portrait of how a murder could be both planned and hidden in plain sight. 

The reader is invited to watch the slow unravelling, to notice the tiny misalignments that, when added together, become decisive.

There is also a moral seriousness to this work. He refuses easy answers and resists the temptation to turn people into symbols. The book asks the reader to sit with ambiguity: to feel sympathy and suspicion in the same breath, to understand that culpability can be braided through everyday life. 

This ethical complexity is one of the book’s strengths; it makes the narrative feel less like a verdict and more like an inquiry into the human condition.

The courtroom scenes are handled with the same measured craft as the domestic ones. The author does not dramatise legal procedure for effect; he renders it as a sequence of human decisions, technical tests and rhetorical manoeuvres. 

The law appears not as an abstract moral arbiter but as a human institution, fallible and procedural, where truth is teased out through cross-examination, expert testimony and the slow accretion of evidence. That depiction lends the book a sober realism: justice is not a sudden revelation but a painstaking construction.

For readers who come to true crime seeking gore or spectacle, A Recipe for Murder will be a different sort of satisfaction: a slow, exacting unravelling that rewards attention. 

For those who appreciate prose that attends to the small, telling details of life, McNab’s work will feel like a well-made dish — composed, balanced, and quietly devastating. 

The book does not promise catharsis; it offers instead a careful, literate excavation of a case that is as much about ordinary human routines as it is about the extraordinary consequences that can follow when those routines are weaponised.

In the end, the book’s quiet power lies in its refusal to sensationalise. It treats its subjects with a kind of austere compassion and trusts the reader to sit with the discomfort that follows. 

A Recipe for Murder is a work of attentive reporting and disciplined storytelling: a book that reads like a well-composed dish, balanced in flavour and devastating in its aftertaste. 

It is a study in contrasts — warmth against chill, patience against sudden loss — and it leaves the reader with the uneasy knowledge that the most intimate spaces of our lives can also be the most dangerous.

If this author’s aim is to make us look again at the ordinary and see how easily it can be turned lethal, he succeeds. This is not a book that will be devoured in a single breathless sitting; it is one to be read slowly, with attention to the small, telling details. 

In that slow reading there is a kind of moral education: a reminder that the domestic is never merely domestic, and that the rituals of everyday life can, in the wrong hands, become instruments of ruin.

I've enjoyed several of Duncan McNab's true crime books, most notably The Usual Suspect: The Life of Abe Saffron (2005); Killing Mr Rent-a-Kill (2012); Roger Rogerson: From Hero Cop to Convicted Murderer – The Inside Story (2016) and Getting Away with Murder (2017). This latest kept me up late into the night for weeks.

Highly recommended.