Rarely has a piece of journalism had the impact as that of Estelle Blackburn’s book Broken Lives….it brought into sharp relief what many of us had suspected for years: all was not well in the WA police force and in the State’s justice system.” (He said the book should be …
The world needs people like Estelle Blackburn with the passion, strength of conviction and sheer courage to hold to her beliefs in spite of the powerful resistance she experienced.
Displaying professional courage, her work and painstaking research served to uncover concealed evidence of alleged police blunders and the tragic consequences for two people. It also, for the first time, detailed the life and times and unreported crimes of the last man hanged in WA, Eric Edgar Cooke…….Apart from the …
I treasure the book, not only because it is a good read but because of what it represents.
Describe your book in one word: powerful. You did a truly wonderful job both engaging the reader and engrossing the expert.
I highly recommend Estelle’s book Broken Lives
Broken Lives delves into the life of convicted serial killer Eric Cooke – the last man hanged in Western Australia – and has had a lasting effect on the state’s justice system.
It’s the best true crime book I’ve read since Sins of the Brother, Mark Whittaker’s account of the Backpacker Murders. Blackburn set out to write a “true crime novel”, a la Capote’s In Cold Blood, rather than a more dry journalistic account, and the book works on several levels: gruesome …
Broken Lives rewrote the past and changed the future of all it touched.