Straight after two historical crime stories about poet Emily Dickinson, Amanda Flower leaps to another historical heroine for inspiration. Katharine Wright may not be as familiar a name, but readers will know of her brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright. TO SLIP THE BONDS OF EARTH starts just as the young men have succeeded in achieving almost a minute of powered flight.

Katharine, the younger sister of the inventors, finished college and now works as a Latin teacher, though she gets passed over for Ancient Greek as less qualified male teachers want the prestige. While the brothers are away experimenting with flying machines and roughing it at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Katharine runs the comfortable family home in Dayton, Ohio. She also steps in to run the brothers’ bicycle shop, which has a printwork upstairs as Orville and Wilbur love working with any kind of machinery. Cars are starting to replace horses and buggies on the streets. While some residents make a mockery of the idea of flying, it’s clear that inventions are worth good money.

I didn’t even need a crime to hold my interest, but we got one. Wilbur and Katharine attend a well-off family’s festivities in the lead-up to Christmas, and the machinery plans go missing from Wilbur’s jacket. Searching the grand house for them, the siblings discover a man has been stabbed to death. Suspicion falls on either Wilbur or a Latin student called Benny Shaw. The concerned teacher decides to clear both young men from suspicion, and she still needs to find those flying machine plans.

December in Dayton feels just as cold as elsewhere, and I very much enjoyed seeing the town decorated, with parties, a Christmas tree sale, and snowy footstep clues. I highly recommend TO SLIP THE BONDS OF EARTH, for a great deal of fascinating background and a look at how women of all classes were treated in 1903. Amanda Flower deserves credit for bringing a strong, intelligent lady to our notice, and I hope she will write more mysteries featuring Miss Katharine Wright.