First published in 1865, and billed as "Australia's first murder mystery", Force and Fraud is a well paced 19th century melodrama. The characters are fairly thinly drawn, but the social observations seem (from this temporal distance) accurate to time and place. To the reader the outcome seems obvious from early in the book, and the mystery is only in the minds of the characters themselves. Not a bad read at all, and the biographical notes on the author are a great read in themselves.