Book Reviews
Fresh, original and creative, this lively [work] brings together a cross section of women from Seneca Falls in 1848—a librarian, women's rights activist, former slave, brothel keeper, plantation wife/slave owner and town cultural advocate—each with strong opinions that will reflect on the history of activism prior to the Civil War.
Syracuse Post-Standard
North Star Conspiracy is a reasonably serious mystery that is also a good bit of fun, set in 1854. With her friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Seneca Falls librarian Glynis Tryon also works on such feminist issues as suffrage. Glynis is no dilettante; when she has an opportunity early in the book to marry a man she truly cares for, she turns him down. To assent would man the end of her career. Fully involved in the life of the community, Glynis becomes caught in a web of intrigue that includes murder and shows herself a capable ratiocinator. Like other entries in the series, the novel features historical notes at the end detailing people, places, and things the reader meets or hears about in the course of the story. A bit too much late-20th-century sensibility manifests itself in Glynis Tryon's point of view, but the story remains enjoyable.
Grant Burns - Librarians in Fiction, A Critical Bibliography
In 1854, six years after her adventures with Elizabeth Cady Stanton described in Seneca Falls Inheritance, librarian Glynis Tryon returns for a suspense-filled adventure based on the northward escape of fugitive slaves. Women's rights' advocate Glynis rejects the marriage proposal of her friend Constable Cullen Stuart, who leaves Seneca Falls, N.Y., to join the Pinkertons. Missing him, she busies herself in the planning of the town's new theater and the upcoming campaign for state assembly of a banker who favors women's rights. She is puzzled by both the recent suspicious death of a freed slave from Virginia and the murder of a slave-catcher who was last seen with a woman from the theater group. Then Niles, her landlady's son, returns from Virginia to announce his plans to marry Kiri, a slave whom he has convinced to run away. Glynis's role in helping Kiri farther along the Underground Railroad and her observations at Niles's trial in Virginia for abetting the slave's escape mesh seamlessly with details of the librarian's personal life in this intricately plotted, historically vivid, thoroughly satisfying mystery.
Publishers Weekly
Unmarried (by choice) librarian Glynis Tryon (Seneca Falls Inheritance) learns firsthand of the iniquities of slavery when her boardinghouse landlady's son Niles returns to their western New York home with Kiri—a beautiful mulatto slave he helped escape from a Virginia plantation. A slave-catcher is on their trail, and though Glynis manages to get Kiri to her sister's house in Rochester, a stop on the Underground Railroad, Niles is captured and returned to Virginia to stand trial. In Richmond to help Niles's lawyer, Glynis learns that three recent murders back home all tie in with Kiri—and with the murder of her fleeing family 13 years before by a villainous overseer, now living up north under another identity. With help from Constable Sundown and Cullen Stuart, a Pinkerton detective, Glynis and Kiri bait a trap for the villain and spring it during the debut performance of Macbeth at Seneca Falls's just-opened theater. Stimulating fare (despite a subplot or two too many) that effectively parallels the powerlessness of slaves and women—the disenfranchised—building to a dramatic courtroom sequence. Sojourner Truth, Matthew Brady, et al., appear in memorable cameos.
Kirkus Reviews