On a Sunday evening in July 2011, 40-year-old Anthony Dunning was pinned to the floor of Melbourne's Crown Casino by security staff. Four days later, he died in the intensive care unit of the Alfred Hospital. The incident was reported to the police not by Crown Casino, but by two friends who were with Dunning on the night. Later that week, a spokesperson for the police said that even though Crown has no legal requirement to report such incidents, 'they probably had a moral obligation' to do so. Crown Casino said that its employees had just been doing their job. Three months later, a young security guard was charged with manslaughter.

Michaela McGuire follows the manslaughter trial of the Crown Casino bouncers, trying to make sense of the gap between ethics and the law. She speaks to problem gamblers and psychologists, a casino priest and David Walsh, Australia’s most notorious gambler. Last Bets is a book about how and why, when it comes to gambling, morals and the law are irrevocably intertwined.

Michaela McGuire is the author of Apply Within: Stories of career sabotage and the Penguin Special A Story of Grief. McGuire is a regular contributor to The Monthly and Good Weekend, and she has worked as a columnist for The Saturday Age and QWeekend. She co-curates and hosts the bestselling literary salon Women of Letters and writes a weekly blog for The Monthly, 'Twirling Towards Freedom'.