Now in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Rajah Quilt is considered one of Australia's most important textiles. The gallery website describes it as "a work of great documentary importance in Australia's history, it is also an extraordinary work of art; a product of beauty from the hands of many women who, while in the most abject circumstances, were able to work together to produce something of hope".

On its border, a stitched inscription thanks "the ladies of the convict ship committee" for their "exertions for their welfare", presenting the quilt as "a proof . . . of being industrious".

In 1816, Elizabeth Fry, concerned about the treatment of women in prison and during transportation, had formed the British Ladies Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners.

The committee resolved to provide every woman transported to Australia with fabric, threads, pins, scissors and two-pounds weight of patchwork pieces, as well as a bible and two aprons.

Among the women on the Rajah, 15 claimed needlework as their previous occupation, though a small number of blood stains on the quilt suggests the pricked fingers of the less skilled.

The finished product is a beautiful, intricately crafted quilt of 2815 pieces, twice the size of a double bed, created from the typical cheap fabric of the time, with the exception of the chintz birds and roses in the central panel, which may have been provided by Kezia Hayter.

The voyage of the Rajah is well documented. The surgeon's and captain's logs have survived, as has Kezia Hayter's diary, and the list of the convicts' names and the crimes for which they were transported.

There were 10 children on board, as well as a returning clergyman, Reverend Roland Davies. There is also evidence that Kezia Hayter and Captain Charles Ferguson, the master of the Rajah, fell in love during the voyage, as they were engaged to be married before the ship reached Hobart.

British-based author Hope Adams first saw the Rajah Quilt, on loan from the National Gallery of Australia, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2009 and says she had wanted to write about it ever since.

Encouraged by best-selling author Sophie Hannah, who helped her with "plot quandaries, reading numerous versions and bits of versions", the result is Dangerous Women.

Adams has used the surviving rich source material as the basis for her utterly compelling version of a locked-room mystery, because, in Dangerous Women, 90 days into the voyage of the Rajah, one of the convict women, Hattie Matthews, is murdered.

Adams then divides her novel between 'Then' and 'Now', looping back in time to the beginning of the voyage to introduce the women at the centre of the story and the beginning of work on the quilt, as the authorities on the ship investigate the murder.

Adams also uses two narrative voices, Kezia's and that of a convict woman who has taken another's identity to escape the gallows, and for whom the Rajah is " a chance to leave behind the person I was" and find a better life in Tasmania. Her backstory is harrowing and indicative of the moral limits women would cross to survive.

The women convicts are appalled at the cramped conditions below decks; the smell; being "packed like apples in a pantry" on narrow hard bunks; the lack of light and the limitations of the food. Kezia wonders "how so many women - almost two hundred - would survive in such a place for two months".

As they set sail, some women are overcome by misery, convinced they will never see England or their families again. Kezia, however, despite also wondering if "she would miss her old life, her old home", is "determined to be strong for the women, who were often victims, she thought, in spite of their behaviour".

But the harmony on board that she has achieved through the making of the quilt is threatened when Hattie is fatally stabbed. The women are unsettled and suspicious of each other, knowing there's a murderer in their midst.

However, at the end of the voyage, when Kezia looks at the finished quilt, she realises that "the very act of coming together every single day, of sitting quietly, sewing, one next to another, of knowing what they were achieving was something of beauty: that had made them more than a gathering of individual souls; that was what transformed them into a sisterhood".

Dangerous Women is a story of love, loss and hope, as well as a fitting tribute to the convict women on the Rajah. It is also a fascinating introduction to an NGA treasure.