In the annals of international true crime, it occasionally feels to me like Australia doesn't get enough of a look-in. To be sure the Australian true crime book is not an unknown quantity, but how often does it propagate beyond its native shores? I'm happy, therefore, to see Patrick Blackden's Danger Down Under on the shelves.

This book forms part of a new true crime series published by Virgin (called, with no points or prizes given for originality, Virgin True Crime). It's basically a whistlestop tour of the highpoints of Australian crime from 1788 to 2002; given that the book has only about 250 pages to cover the history of the place, it doesn't have much choice but sticking to the highlights. Still, those highlights are good ones.

The first chapter alone, for example, introduces us to the Tasmanian cannibal Alexander Pearce, Australia's most prolific serial killer John Lynch (others may have killed more but even after 160 years no one has been convicted of more murders), family killer and one-time Jack The Ripper suspect Frederick Deeming, and the "Brownout Strangler" Edward Leonski. Other chapters treat such subjects as serial killing, sex crime and gang violence, while the cases of the Kelly Gang, Eric Edgar Cooke, Ivan Milat and Martin Bryant get chapters of their own.

Blackden succeeds in sticking to his promise of covering the more interesting cases in detail rather than skimming over a lot of cases. It's perhaps not always as detailed as you'd like and it occasionally gets taken over by a slightly sensationalised tone, but for the most part it's cleanly presented and always interesting. (American gun nuts who can't understand why Australia's gun laws are so much more prohibitive than in the US may be interested to discover that in the late 1800s citizens here were empowered by law to shoot known outlaws on sight. Funny how we seem to have survived the decades since that law was revoked about as well as the US has done with the legal ownership of guns.)

Despite a couple of rather glaring omissions (no Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson? no Mark "Chopper" Read?), Danger Down Under makes for a reasonable introduction to Australian true crime for when you get fed up with shelves full of Jack The Ripper and Ann Rule.