The nine true stories of murder, dispossession, violence and misadventure contained in Dark Tales all took place in the Gascoyne Region during the thirty-three-year tenure of Magistrate C.D.V. Foss, which ended in 1915. Accounts from a wide array of contemporaneous newspapers illuminate these events and expose the dark side of our colonial history. They show how policing and the justice system were used not only to track down serial murderers and petty criminals, but also to subjugate Aboriginal peoples and persecute migrants from Asia --and how many were compelled to take the law into their own hands.