Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law is a non-fiction book written by Australian author Helen Garner, and published in 2004.
[2] Anu Singh, a law student at Canberra's Australian National University, killed her boyfriend Joe Cinque on 26 October 1997 with a lethal dose of heroin, after she had laced his coffee with Rohypnol.
Joe Cinque's Consolation begins with Garner being informed of Singh's second 1999 trial and its circumstances, when it was already in progress.
As the trial progresses she becomes acquainted with Cinque's mother Maria and feels that the court system is not distributing sufficient justice to the victim or his family.
Because of Singh's refusal to be interviewed or contacted, Garner bases most of her information about the woman from erstwhile friends, anecdotal evidence and court transcripts.
Additionally, Garner notes the accused kept diaries about her interactions with men as a teen in which she treated them as disposable commodities, wore high heels to high school, and according to anecdotal evidence from her former best friend, treated Cinque with an element of derision–sometimes mocking him and making jibes about what she thought was a lack of intellect and sophistication to her friends.
Garner uses the case to explore far-reaching themes of human behaviour, culpability and responsibility, duty of care, victims' rights and crime/punishment.
Garner questions whether a "psychological sophistication" that has developed in light of modern behavioural science overrides the fact that some actions are plainly wrong and should be punishable, regardless of the pathology of the person who commits them.
Singh's defence team used her "abnormality of mind" (a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and psychotic depression was referenced in the court proceedings) as an explanation for her killing Cinque, akin to the insanity defense.
[4] The complicity of the students, and whether or not they played a role in Cinque's death by not alerting authorities, was also a topic debated extensively throughout the text.
[7] Criticisms of the book centred on it failing to tell the story it set out to tell, particularly its inability to explain Singh or her actions[8][9] and her failure to engage with the purpose of the adversarial justice system.
[6] The cover of the re-printed edition from 2006 contains a blurb extracted from a review in The Bulletin, which reads: "A book which functions at one level as a psychological mystery, but at deeper levels is an exploration of the adequacy of the law to dispense justice, and the responsibility that human beings have to each other...It is told with compassion, a singular kind of honesty, and unadorned intelligence".