The novel Wedderburn: A True Tale of Blood and Dust by author Maryrose Cuskelly was launched on Thursday, detailing the court case and interviews with several family members and friends of both Jamieson and his victims Greg Holmes, Mary Lockhart and Peter Lockhart.

But the cover has drawn criticism from members of the victims’ families.

It features a blue wren – the family’s symbol for Mary Lockhart – sitting on top of a knife above the words “what does it take to provoke a murder?”

A quote on the back cover also suggests that Jamieson, who is serving a life sentence for the brutal murders in Wedderburn in 2014, had done the town “a favour”.

Maree St Clair – the daughter of Mary Lockhart and sister of Greg Holmes – said she wrote to the author “forcefully” criticising the cover.

“When I first looked – I almost had a heart attack,” she said.

“It was very confronting in that the wren was our symbol for mum.

“[The author] said: read the book. I’ve done that, and I’d still like to rip the cover off.

“I hate the quote on the back – it’s disgusting.”

Ms St Clair consented to be interviewed as part of the book, and believed the overall narrative gave an accurate impression of Jamieson.

Ms Cuskelly said she understood that the imagery would be confronting to family members, but it was a decision of the publisher.

“I can understand that there is something, understandably, kind of jarring about it,” she said.

“The intention of the cover was to have symbols of the three victims on it as well.

“It is a very confronting image and menacing but as I said it was important too that the victims were represented in some way on the cover.”

Published by Allen and Unwin, the book is likely to have wide circulation throughout Australia.

Ms Cuskelly said “if we fail to examine these terrible events when they happen then we can’t learn from them”.

“A story like this, I think it kind of feeds into conversations we were already having as a society about rage on our roads, on social media, and there’s this discussion about toxic masculinity,” she said.

“I was also so terribly moved by just the strength, the dignity and resilience of the Holmes family through this all.”

Ms Cuskelly said the title “Wedderburn” was “not meant to reflect the town as a whole” and it was just a “working title” on the manuscript that the publisher decided to keep.

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