Allen & Unwin

The true story of a high profile suburban Melbourne murder - one of the last to allow the defence of provocation. James Ramage was a prosperous man. And like all prosperous men James Ramage owned things - a nice house in middle class Balwyn, a successful business, a healthy bank account, two teenagers at elite private schools, and a beautiful wife. To anyone looking on, it seemed that James Ramage had it all. Then one day his lovely wife left him. Forever.

... the inside story of the controversial shooting of undercover policeman Michael Drury.

On 29th February 2000, Katherine Knight committed an unspeakable act. A mother of four and a grandmother, she seduced and then stabbed John Price 37 times.

A former abattoir worker, she skinned him.

A loving partner, she cooked him with vegetables, making a soup with his head. Made gravy. Left him on plates for his family. Why?

Pricey was her de facto and he wanted out. She didn't like that.

From the mid 1960s, a brazen band of Australian thieves ran riot in London for more than a decade, pulling off the most daring heists Scotland Yard had ever seen. They were tagged by the Press as the Kangaroo Gang.

The gang, led by the charismatic 'King' Arthur Delaney, targeted the plush emporia of Knightsbridge and the fine jewellers of Mayfair. But the King didn' t stop there, criss-crossing Europe to lay siege to the luxury retailers of Paris, Brussels, Rome and beyond.

At 8 he was smuggling heroin out of the house when his parents were raided. At 15 he was using heroin every day. At 17 he was earning $1200 a week selling cocaine. At 18 he was sentenced to life in Penang Prison plus six strokes of the cane for drug trafficking. At 29 he was pardoned ... and his life began.

Why would a 17-year-old youth be driven to bash, dismember and mutilate the body of the 68-year-old former Mayor of Wollongong? Mark Valera stripped the victim, stuck pins into his eyes and kicked and beat the corpse for several hours before discarding his own clothes for those of the dead man's. Two weeks earlier, the body of a 60-year-old shopkeeper was discovered in his suburban Wollongong home, his severed head jammed in the kitchen sink. Again, Valera's handiwork.

It was the largest bank robbery in Australian history. On Sunday 14 September 1828, thieves tunnelled through a sewage drain into the vault of Sydney's Bank of Australia and stole 14 000 in notes and cash - the equivalent of $20 million in today's currency. This audacious group of convicts not only defied the weekly exhortation 'thou shalt not steal!', they targeted the bank owned by the colony's self-anointed nobility.

In 1829 at the Supreme Court in Sydney, the bewitching Jane New was sentenced to death. Her crime: shoplifting a bolt of printed French silk. But was she guilty? Many had their doubts.

Although a legal technicality soon quashed Jane's sentence, the autocratic Governor Ralph Darling refused to set her free. Like bees to the honey pot, the gentlemen of Sydney swarmed to Jane's defence including barrister and political agitator William Charles Wentworth and Supreme Court Registrar John Stephen Jr, who were both vigorous and manipulative in their appeals to set her free.

A true-life Wild West story set in Australia, involving murder, gun battles, a huge posse and the largest manhunt in Australian history.

When Jimmy Governor, known as a hard worker who played a good game of cricket, married Ethel Page in 1898 he was challenging a code. For Ethel Page was a white women and Jimmy Governor's skin was black. Two and a half years later, the cost of that challenge was nine murders and three judicial executions.

Father's Day 1984: seven people die in a blaze of gunfire on a sunny afternoon in a hotel car park.

Among the dead, a fifteen year old girl caught in the crossfire when two heavily-armed bikie gangs, the Comancheros and the Bandidos, clash.

Brothers in Arms tells the extraordinary story of this murderous outbreak, from its vicious beginnings in the closed world of Sydney's motorcycle gangs to its inevitable end in death and imprisonment.