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 off: 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 Fraser: 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.