Debut author Hope Adams puts one hundred and eighty condemned women on the Rajah, a convict transport ship leaving London in 1841 and heading to Australia in her novel, Dangerous Women. All are convicts, but their crimes tend to be stealing food because their children are hungry or some other petty offense. This background is based on an actual ship and real happenings, but she weaves a fictional mystery into the story. The women don’t appear to be threatening until one of them is stabbed with a knife, putting her at risk of losing her life. Then comes the search for the dangerous woman capable of murder.
The backstory of the suspects comes out in a “Now” and “Then” format with the “Now” chapters relating the present of the voyage as the women follow the lead of the matron on the ship to produce a special quilt. Each of the women carries a secret of how she came to this point and some hope of making a better life in a new setting with their old circumstances related in the “Then” chapters. The “Then” chapter introductions give a nod to the quilt by describing a fabric and its shape in the quilt, such as “Cotton piece: geometric groups of four squares in dark blue and red on a drab ground, each set of four squares arranged to form another square.”
Each woman comes individually to be questioned about what she may have seen or heard. Is it one of them or could it have been someone else? What was the meaning of the words stitched on Hattie’s blue cotton piece, “Speak & you die”? And who was “not Freddie” that Hattie mentioned just before she passed out? Could the suspicions of the women be wrong and some shipmate be guilty instead?
This new novel is a good read with an especial appeal to those who like a historical background, a mystery, and quilts.