What do you think?
Rate this book
The Dangerous Wife : A True Legal Thriller
Melbourne, Australia, 1899
A society wife shoots her husband on a crowded street, shouting ‘I did it!’ Then she pleads not guilty.
The courtroom becomes a battleground as two of Melbourne’s fiercest legal minds face the principled prosecutor who plays for justice, and the flamboyant showman who plays to the crowd. Newspapers howl. The city takes sides. And at the centre stands Mrs Kathleen volatile, defiant, and impossible to ignore.
Is she a monster? Hysterical? Or a woman pushed beyond endurance in a world built to silence her?
Will she walk free—or pay with her life?
The Dangerous Wife resurrects a sensational trial that captivated Australia and then disappeared from history—now reconstructed for the first time from the original evidence. Court transcripts, depositions, private letters, shorthand notes, and hundreds of newspaper reports bring the case to life with the drive and immediacy of a legal thriller.
Gripping, shocking, and meticulously researched, it exposes a legal system where a woman’s best defence was to play the lady.
“A gripping true crime story told with the insight of a forensic legal mind.” —Roy Maloy, true crime history author
About the Author
M. J. Checketts is a former senior partner of a major Australian law firm. Trained in England and based in Melbourne, he built a career advising on complex legal matters and today serves on several professional services boards. His writing blends narrative pace with forensic research and a lawyer's instinct for nuance, capturing the human drama behind each courtroom battle. The Dangerous Wife is his first work of narrative non-fiction.
A society wife shoots her husband on a crowded street, shouting ‘I did it!’ Then she pleads not guilty.
The courtroom becomes a battleground as two of Melbourne’s fiercest legal minds face the principled prosecutor who plays for justice, and the flamboyant showman who plays to the crowd. Newspapers howl. The city takes sides. And at the centre stands Mrs Kathleen volatile, defiant, and impossible to ignore.
Is she a monster? Hysterical? Or a woman pushed beyond endurance in a world built to silence her?
Will she walk free—or pay with her life?
The Dangerous Wife resurrects a sensational trial that captivated Australia and then disappeared from history—now reconstructed for the first time from the original evidence. Court transcripts, depositions, private letters, shorthand notes, and hundreds of newspaper reports bring the case to life with the drive and immediacy of a legal thriller.
Gripping, shocking, and meticulously researched, it exposes a legal system where a woman’s best defence was to play the lady.
“A gripping true crime story told with the insight of a forensic legal mind.” —Roy Maloy, true crime history author
About the Author
M. J. Checketts is a former senior partner of a major Australian law firm. Trained in England and based in Melbourne, he built a career advising on complex legal matters and today serves on several professional services boards. His writing blends narrative pace with forensic research and a lawyer's instinct for nuance, capturing the human drama behind each courtroom battle. The Dangerous Wife is his first work of narrative non-fiction.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 3, 2026
2 people are currently reading
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Author
The Dangerous Wife reads like a legal thriller, but it’s far more unsettling because every page is anchored in fact.
M.J. Checketts resurrects a century-old Australian murder case with the pacing of fiction and the discipline of a meticulous lawyer-historian. From the opening pages, it’s clear this isn’t just a true-crime retelling—it’s a forensic dismantling of power, gender, marriage, and the legal system at the turn of the twentieth century.
Kathleen Fraser is instantly compelling and deeply uncomfortable. She is not softened for modern sensibilities, nor reduced to a caricature of madness or victimhood. Instead, she emerges as volatile, intelligent, furious, wounded, and frighteningly determined—a woman pushing violently against the rigid boundaries of her time. The question isn’t simply did she do it? (she did), but what forces made this outcome feel inevitable?
Checketts used primary sources—particularly the astonishing discovery of Pitman shorthand notes embedded in prosecution documents. These marginalia breathe life into the courtroom, capturing exchanges the press either ignored or sanitized. The result is a vivid, almost cinematic reconstruction of legal combat, complete with ego, theater, and quiet cruelty.
The barristers themselves—especially the flamboyant Purves and the principled Finlayson—are rendered with sharp clarity. Their courtroom duel becomes a study in how truth can be bent, obscured, or overwhelmed by performance. It’s a sobering reminder that justice is not always aligned with facts, particularly when class, gender, and reputation are in play.
Despite its depth, the book never feels academic. The prose is controlled but evocative, with moments of genuine tension and dread. Melbourne itself becomes a character: dusty streets, social hypocrisy, and polite façades concealing rot beneath.
The Dangerous Wife refuses easy conclusions or moral shortcuts. It asks the reader to sit with ambiguity, rage, and injustice—and to recognize how disturbingly modern this “forgotten” case still feels.
M.J. Checketts resurrects a century-old Australian murder case with the pacing of fiction and the discipline of a meticulous lawyer-historian. From the opening pages, it’s clear this isn’t just a true-crime retelling—it’s a forensic dismantling of power, gender, marriage, and the legal system at the turn of the twentieth century.
Kathleen Fraser is instantly compelling and deeply uncomfortable. She is not softened for modern sensibilities, nor reduced to a caricature of madness or victimhood. Instead, she emerges as volatile, intelligent, furious, wounded, and frighteningly determined—a woman pushing violently against the rigid boundaries of her time. The question isn’t simply did she do it? (she did), but what forces made this outcome feel inevitable?
Checketts used primary sources—particularly the astonishing discovery of Pitman shorthand notes embedded in prosecution documents. These marginalia breathe life into the courtroom, capturing exchanges the press either ignored or sanitized. The result is a vivid, almost cinematic reconstruction of legal combat, complete with ego, theater, and quiet cruelty.
The barristers themselves—especially the flamboyant Purves and the principled Finlayson—are rendered with sharp clarity. Their courtroom duel becomes a study in how truth can be bent, obscured, or overwhelmed by performance. It’s a sobering reminder that justice is not always aligned with facts, particularly when class, gender, and reputation are in play.
Despite its depth, the book never feels academic. The prose is controlled but evocative, with moments of genuine tension and dread. Melbourne itself becomes a character: dusty streets, social hypocrisy, and polite façades concealing rot beneath.
The Dangerous Wife refuses easy conclusions or moral shortcuts. It asks the reader to sit with ambiguity, rage, and injustice—and to recognize how disturbingly modern this “forgotten” case still feels.
February 10, 2026
✨ ARC/Review Copy ✨
This true crime legal thriller is a narrative non-fiction that reads like a movie. Mrs. Fraser shot her husband on the street in broad daylight with witnesses. So - how is she supposed to get off scot-free?
This book doesn't read like a stodgy non-fiction retelling. I can't believe this is MJ's first narrative non-fiction! It's compelling and really seemed to add in the best parts and pieces of the story, and that of the people involved, in as much detail as needed, without dragging it out unnecessarily.
The lawyers involved had quite a backstory getting to this point in time. Combine that with how the courts worked in the late 1890s, in what would soon become a united Australia, and it feels like the roughness of a frontier land still trying to forge their own law system while simultaneously relying on the old system from Great Britain.
MJ gave us some relevant casework from that time period to set up what had already happened in similar situations, or what was likely to or could happen, to set expectations - which was really helpful since I'm no 1890s Melbourne Australia law expert. 😆
The shenanigans that were allowed and how they are still allowed even until the late 1900s was just - c-razy! 🤯
I loved this book! 🤩
If you like true crime podcasts, watch YouTube channels like Rotten Mango, or like TV shows like Law & Order, you may like this book.
Triggers: Abortion, Death, Murder, Violence
Fav Quotes:
- Wimmera Place was short and neat, the kind of street where curtains twitched behind cast-iron lacework and respectability hung in the air like scented soap.
- One of those bloomer-clad radicals who took to litigation like a suffragist to a soapbox.
- Yet this was a setup so bent you could use it as a coat hook.
This true crime legal thriller is a narrative non-fiction that reads like a movie. Mrs. Fraser shot her husband on the street in broad daylight with witnesses. So - how is she supposed to get off scot-free?
This book doesn't read like a stodgy non-fiction retelling. I can't believe this is MJ's first narrative non-fiction! It's compelling and really seemed to add in the best parts and pieces of the story, and that of the people involved, in as much detail as needed, without dragging it out unnecessarily.
The lawyers involved had quite a backstory getting to this point in time. Combine that with how the courts worked in the late 1890s, in what would soon become a united Australia, and it feels like the roughness of a frontier land still trying to forge their own law system while simultaneously relying on the old system from Great Britain.
MJ gave us some relevant casework from that time period to set up what had already happened in similar situations, or what was likely to or could happen, to set expectations - which was really helpful since I'm no 1890s Melbourne Australia law expert. 😆
The shenanigans that were allowed and how they are still allowed even until the late 1900s was just - c-razy! 🤯
I loved this book! 🤩
If you like true crime podcasts, watch YouTube channels like Rotten Mango, or like TV shows like Law & Order, you may like this book.
Triggers: Abortion, Death, Murder, Violence
Fav Quotes:
- Wimmera Place was short and neat, the kind of street where curtains twitched behind cast-iron lacework and respectability hung in the air like scented soap.
- One of those bloomer-clad radicals who took to litigation like a suffragist to a soapbox.
- Yet this was a setup so bent you could use it as a coat hook.
February 3, 2026
Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
The Dangerous Wife by M. J. Checketts is a gripping, narrative non-fiction, legal thriller that I simply could not put down — a no-contest 5-star rating. The novel artfully pulls together both primary and secondary sources to tell the story surrounding Mrs. Kathleen Fraser’s sensational trial that captivated 1899-1900 Melbourne, Australia. The narrative is cohesive and includes pivotal insights into the legal proceedings, societal norms of the time, and current events, that truly allow you to understand and immerse yourself into the story. It even includes prints and photographs of relevant persons, places, and news articles. Despite clearly being a work of narrative non-fiction, I never felt like I was being lectured or taught. I found it particularly interesting to read about how the trial and surrounding events walked the knife’s edge of feminism in the turn of the century, with Kathleen embodying both sides of the feminine coin to her advantage as needed — society’s views on what a woman was and on the burgeoning ideas of what a woman could be. I had no criticisms in my notes by the time I finished reading and I found it on par with popular narrative non-fiction works such as The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. I recommend!
The Dangerous Wife by M. J. Checketts is a gripping, narrative non-fiction, legal thriller that I simply could not put down — a no-contest 5-star rating. The novel artfully pulls together both primary and secondary sources to tell the story surrounding Mrs. Kathleen Fraser’s sensational trial that captivated 1899-1900 Melbourne, Australia. The narrative is cohesive and includes pivotal insights into the legal proceedings, societal norms of the time, and current events, that truly allow you to understand and immerse yourself into the story. It even includes prints and photographs of relevant persons, places, and news articles. Despite clearly being a work of narrative non-fiction, I never felt like I was being lectured or taught. I found it particularly interesting to read about how the trial and surrounding events walked the knife’s edge of feminism in the turn of the century, with Kathleen embodying both sides of the feminine coin to her advantage as needed — society’s views on what a woman was and on the burgeoning ideas of what a woman could be. I had no criticisms in my notes by the time I finished reading and I found it on par with popular narrative non-fiction works such as The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. I recommend!
Review of advance copy
“Respectable women [don’t] shoot their husbands”
That a story of this magnitude could vanish into obscurity for more than a century seems almost as extraordinary as the story itself.
Let me set the scene. It is 1899 and Victoria is on the brink of Federation. A society woman, Mrs Kathleen Fraser, fires a revolver into her husband’s head on a busy street in St Kilda, and yet somehow walks free. The facts, improbable as though they may seem, are entirely true.
In a genre-bending first, Checketts seamlessly weaves rigorous historical research into a narrative that reads with the pace and tension of a page-turning thriller. As Mrs Fraser moves through the trial that gripped Melbourne, the reader is transported into the courtroom itself through excerpts of news articles, photographs and never before seen trial transcripts. And not to mention, being treated to the delightfully brazen antics of Melbourne’s legal elite.
For lovers of history, law, and/or unapologetically badass women, The Dangerous Wife is not a title to miss. What an exciting and groundbreaking debut novel. MJ Checketts is an upcoming Australian author to keep your eyes on.
That a story of this magnitude could vanish into obscurity for more than a century seems almost as extraordinary as the story itself.
Let me set the scene. It is 1899 and Victoria is on the brink of Federation. A society woman, Mrs Kathleen Fraser, fires a revolver into her husband’s head on a busy street in St Kilda, and yet somehow walks free. The facts, improbable as though they may seem, are entirely true.
In a genre-bending first, Checketts seamlessly weaves rigorous historical research into a narrative that reads with the pace and tension of a page-turning thriller. As Mrs Fraser moves through the trial that gripped Melbourne, the reader is transported into the courtroom itself through excerpts of news articles, photographs and never before seen trial transcripts. And not to mention, being treated to the delightfully brazen antics of Melbourne’s legal elite.
For lovers of history, law, and/or unapologetically badass women, The Dangerous Wife is not a title to miss. What an exciting and groundbreaking debut novel. MJ Checketts is an upcoming Australian author to keep your eyes on.
Read
January 17, 2026*Sings* "He had it comin', he had it comin'"
This book just kept making me think of the musical Chicago. In all good ways.
What happens when a woman shoots her husband, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses? A sensational trial full of drama, headlines, and some very interesting characters, of course!
The Dangerous Wife is laid out like a fictional thriller but is even more thrilling as it is all facts.
I love how much Checketts dug into this story. Seeing the pictures of scenes and people involved was wonderful. Reading quotes from participants in a trial that happened halfway around the world from me 126 years ago was fascinating. This was a story I had never heard before and now I feel I can confidently go out and discuss it with anyone, thanks to this book. That is a thing I love in non-fiction.
This is definitely a must read for true crime lovers.
Thank you to the author and Booksirens for an ARC of The Dangerous Wife.
This book just kept making me think of the musical Chicago. In all good ways.
What happens when a woman shoots her husband, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses? A sensational trial full of drama, headlines, and some very interesting characters, of course!
The Dangerous Wife is laid out like a fictional thriller but is even more thrilling as it is all facts.
I love how much Checketts dug into this story. Seeing the pictures of scenes and people involved was wonderful. Reading quotes from participants in a trial that happened halfway around the world from me 126 years ago was fascinating. This was a story I had never heard before and now I feel I can confidently go out and discuss it with anyone, thanks to this book. That is a thing I love in non-fiction.
This is definitely a must read for true crime lovers.
Thank you to the author and Booksirens for an ARC of The Dangerous Wife.
February 3, 2026
This was SO good. I love true crime and this was a fascinating read b/c of the time period. Wen had so few rights and so few options available to them. They were expected to be meek and subservient. But not Kathleen Frasier. This woman was louder than life and refused to be silenced or controlled. You don’t know whether to love her or hate her. I admire how gutsy she was and how she refused to be bullied by men around her. But she was also manipulative and cunning. She was a force to be reckoned with. I absolutely devoured this book. The author did a great job of telling her story and making got read like a crime thriller. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Review of advance copy
Books based on true crimes always hold more impetus for me. For one thing, they are plausible. For another they play out the facts, in sequence, that has captured the public's attention.
This story is set at the turn of the 19th going into the 20th century in Australia. The author is clearly an experienced legal practitioner but the writing is devoid of legal waffle.
A woman kills her husband in public. Two legal heavyweights as alike as chalk and cheese battle it out. Who will win? Will the murderer walk? How influential is the press in influencing not only the public but the outcome of a trial?
I received an advance copy of this book and am leaving this review voluntarily. 5 stars!
This story is set at the turn of the 19th going into the 20th century in Australia. The author is clearly an experienced legal practitioner but the writing is devoid of legal waffle.
A woman kills her husband in public. Two legal heavyweights as alike as chalk and cheese battle it out. Who will win? Will the murderer walk? How influential is the press in influencing not only the public but the outcome of a trial?
I received an advance copy of this book and am leaving this review voluntarily. 5 stars!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews