Rosemary Miner

Greetings from the Adirondacks; land of high peaks, white water, tall tales, wild critters and mayhem. Or as amateur sleuth Miss Grace Wickham would say in Once Upon A Time To Die For, “There may be some who will make something of that.”

How did this mystery come about? When my article on 19th century tanneries was published in 1992 in Adirondack Life magazine, a friend said, ”that would be a good place for a murder.” Sure enough, in the first chapter of Once Upon A Time To Die For, a body is found in a steaming tannery pit. The year is 1873, a time period when Susan B. Anthony is lecturing the country for women’s rights and happens to be the friend of my amateur sleuth, Miss Grace Wickham. She agrees with Susan that a woman should have her own purse and earns her way by seeing patients. With only a year of medical school, she calls herself an Herbal doctor who believes in preventive medicine.

“You seem to know everything that goes on around here,” the partner of the dead man tells my protagonist. And when the coroner asks her to look into things while the constable is out of town, he says, “talk around and see what you can find out. If anyone can, it will be you, Gracie.”

As one reviewer wrote about her, “an appealing amateur sleuth, Grace Wickham is the perfect person to solve the murders of a tannery owner and his wife, because as a doctor, she literally has her finger on the pulse of the community.”