Examines the doping scandals that have occurred at the Essendon Football Club, and also at the Cronulla Rugby League Club in Sydney. When this book was published in 2015 the scandal at the Essendon Football club in particular had not fully played out. An updated edition in 2016 of this book covers some of the subsequent developments in this story. The updated edition, also published by Melbourne University Press, comprises 346 pages.

I have a couple of complaints:

- the author is determined to tell the story in the present tense, but he can't keep this up consistently. The result is sometimes annoying, and sometimes confusing. Sometimes it's just silly:

"After Xu's comments are published in The Australian newspaper, ASADA made contact with the Shanghai-based sales rep for the first time."

- the first edition was published in 2015, before WADA's successful appeal against the Essendon players' aquittal. In this updated edition, the section covering that development is kind of tacked on; the majority of the book builds to one conclusion, and then right at the end things go in a completely different direction. This might reflect reality somewhat, but it's a little disorienting.

- some of the author's judgments seem a bit strange. I'd have to read the relevant chapter again to be sure, but I got the sense that he basically praised the NRL and Cronulla for doing their best to keep the truth from coming out. That may have been a good defence strategy, but it's hardly admirable.

Aside from those complaints, I really like the book. It's deeply researched and does a pretty good job of making a complex, confusing saga digestible. It's very readable, despite the present-tense silliness. It doesn't seem to reflect any overwhelming biases, though of course I'm not really in a position to make that judgment. Few people come out of the story looking particularly good, but most are portrayed with nuance and at least a smidgen of sympathy. ( )

In this book, Australian journalist Chip Le Grand has tackled the peptides saga that dominated sports discussion in his country for more than three years. Essendon (AFL) and Cronulla-Sutherland (NRL) were the professional football teams caught up in this mess. Le Grand's coverage focuses mainly on Essendon's activities.

As has been the case with other coverage of this drawn-out series of events, there is an incredible amount of finger-pointing and very little acceptance of responsibility. As a result, there is a significant number of damaged people and relationships.

To an outsider, it seems pretty obvious what the problem was, and to watch so many people scramble around raising virtually irrelevant points of law to try and prove something (what?) seems to be an extraordinary waste of time and money. It's also incredible to read, in the last chapter, that the main protagonist in the whole affair was very close to working for another AFL club! Does no one in the League do any due diligence about who they hire as an employee or consultant?

Unfortunately, this book was published before WADA decided there *was* a case to answer by Essendon, and the players involved were banned from playing for the 2016 season.

While the research behind this book is clearly excellent, I found some of the telling confusing chronologically, and there seemed, to this reader, to be an anti-AFL and anti-ASADA feel to the story.

I am still at a loss as to why Dr Reid was ever implicated in any wrongdoing at the Club. ( )

The author does a good job of fitting this giant jigsaw puzzle together in a readable form. Besides a clumsily long list of central figures, there is an endless list of secondary actors, dates, locations, leagues, corporations and agencies to try to wrap your head around. While my lack of knowledge regarding Australian news events, government authorities and rugby sporting scene complicated matters, the positive possibilities of finding drama in events that Australians have already been reading about for two years was unmet. In general, this isn't a page turner. That isn't a deal-breaker though. This is solid, in-depth investigative journalism. ( )