Seneca Falls Inheritance - Softcover

Miriam Grace Monfredo, a former librarian and a historian, lives in Rochester, New York. This is the seventh Seneca Falls Mystery. A previous Seneca Falls Mystery, The Stalking-Horse, was chosen by the Voice of Youth Advocacy as one of 1998’s best adult mysteries for young adults and received a “best” review in Library Journal’s young adult section.

Glynis Tryon, busily cataloguing the books that Friedrich Steicher bequeathed to the Seneca Falls library, politely refuses a stranger's request to handle the Steicher family Bible (included by mistake) and then directs the woman to the livery to hire a carriage; she's off to Waterloo in search of her mother's friend- -Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The woman is murdered first, however, and between stocking the library shelves and canvassing the local women about a possible women's rights conference, Glynis learns that the victim was the illegitimate half-sister of Karl Steicher, who thought he was the sole heir to his father's fortune. Furthermore, the woman's husband, Gordon Walker, decides to sue for his dead wife's share. Meanwhile, it's up to Glynis and the constable's deputy, Jacques Sundown, an Indian, to discover who would most benefit from Rose Walker's death--and then to tie this murder in with the killing of a saloon girl. Nicely conceived first novel, which makes good use of Genesee (malaria) fever, Jane Eyre as a threat to job security, and the First Women's Rights Convention of 1848. More romantic than rabid feminists might like, but a telling glimpse at Bloomers, childbirth, and abused wives of the mid-19th century. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.