Sarah Stewart Taylor--Agony Hill

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Sarah Stewart Taylor's Maggie D'Arcy novels, set in Ireland and Long Island, have been huge favorites of all of us here at JRW, and now we have a brand new series to look forward to from Sarah, this one set in small town Vermont! Here she introduces us to fictional Bethany, Vermont, in the 1960s, and contemplates the contradictions of small town life. Welcome, Sarah!

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR:  Small towns loom large in crime fiction — and indeed in literature. I think it’s because they are such ripe territory for exploration of the human condition. When everyone around you has known you since the day you were born, it’s hard to hide, well, anything. And it’s all the more transgressive when you do. The idea of a murderer hiding in plain sight in a small town is fascinating to us as readers because we think of small towns as versions of the many kinds of communities we build in our lives.

St. Mary Mead, Three Pines, Cabot Cove, Midsomer, Miller’s Kill — these places feel real despite being fictional because they contain all of the colorful personalities and hidden and not-so-hidden histories of their inhabitants. And, they provide a special pleasure for crime fiction series readers, a chance to return home to a place you’ve come to know and love every time you open the book.

We have lots of positive associations with small towns. When everyone knows you, it’s hard to fall through the cracks or escape notice when you’re in crisis. There’s a comfort to a place that never seems to change.

But small towns can be suffocating too and that never changing thing can be dangerous for marginalized people. Small towns can make newcomers feel unwelcome or scrutinized to an uncomfortable degree. Vermont, like the other New England states, is engaged in a statewide discussion right now about how  to be more welcoming to the new Vermonters we need to prop up our schools and town governments and help provide more tax dollars to fix our roads and bridges. It’s sparked sometimes difficult but very important conversations about how we may need to change and adapt to attract these new residents.

My own small town (pop. 3,483) is experiencing all of these growing pains. Our town listserv contains daily postings about loose cows in the road, runaway dogs, items for sale, reminders that the food shelf is open, library programs, offers of help with stacking firewood, or free items that might be useful to someone in need. But it also contains arguments over land use and development and, though we’re not supposed to post about political subjects, sometimes bitter debates about hot button topics like book banning, the presidential election, and school funding. Raising my kids in our town, where my husband grew up but I did not, I feel so good about providing them with a community that truly cares about them and will always be there for them. I also really, really hope they’ll go off and explore other parts of the world (and then, yes, move in down the street from us. A mother can hope . . .) 

In so many ways, the small towns near where I live in Vermont, each with their own history and particular makeup and personality, were the inspiration for my novel, Agony Hill, the first in a new series set in Vermont in the 1960s. The fictional Bethany, Vermont has a town green, a general store, a library, two churches, four lawyers, and a widow named Alice Bellows who in many ways keeps the town running. Alice grew up in Bethany and has returned after the death of her husband, who, as they say, “worked in intelligence.” She spent years living abroad and even helped out with some intelligence gathering from time to time. Now she’s back in Bethany and makes it her business to know everything that’s going on, not only because she’s nosy, but because she can help out anyone who might need it. I love Alice and I love the way that she cares for those in her community (even if she sometimes has an ulterior motive!)

She’s committed to her work with the Ladies Aid Society and the town’s library but perhaps feeling a bit bored when a young homicide detective from Boston named Franklin Warren moves in next door. He’s there to take a job with the Vermont State Police and, after a tragedy that Alice will learn more about, is ready to start over in Vermont. He’s barely unpacked when he’s called out to his first case and as he investigates the death of a farmer who no one in town seemed to like, Warren realizes that his new neighbor is an asset in more ways than one.

I’ve loved exploring the experiences of a newcomer to a small town alongside a longtime resident who knows everyone’s secrets. And as I write the second Bethany mystery, I’ve loved revisiting the personalities and places and rituals that make up my fictional small town. I tried to capture this feeling in Agony Hill. Standing in line at Coller’s Store on the Green in Bethany, Alice thinks, “When she’d been away and returned home, she never felt she’d really landed until she’d been in to get the papers and hear the news.”

What are your favorite small towns, real or fictional?

DEBS: What a great question from Sarah! Readers, tell us about your favorite small towns!

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR is the author of the Sweeney St. George series, set in New England, the Maggie D’arcy mysteries, set in Ireland and on Long Island, and Agony Hill, the first in a new series set in rural Vermont in the 1960s.

 

Sarah has been nominated for an Agatha Award, the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and the MWA Sue Grafton Memorial Award and her mysteries have appeared on numerous Best of the Year lists. A former journalist and teacher, she writes and lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. 

Set in rural Vermont in the volatile 1960s, Agony Hill is the first novel in a new historical series full of vivid New England atmosphere and the deeply drawn characters that are Sarah Stewart Taylor's trademark.

In the hot summer of 1965, Bostonian Franklin Warren arrives in Bethany, Vermont, to take a position as a detective with the state police. Warren's new home is on the verge of monumental change; the interstates under construction will bring new people, new opportunities, and new problems to Vermont, and the Cold War and protests against the war in Vietnam have finally reached the dirt roads and rolling pastures of Bethany.

Warren has barely unpacked when he's called up to a remote farm on Agony Hill. Former New Yorker and Back-to-the-Lander Hugh Weber seems to have set fire to his barn and himself, with the door barred from the inside, but things aren’t adding up for Warren. The people of Bethany—from Weber’s enigmatic wife to Warren's neighbor, widow and amateur detective Alice Bellows — clearly have secrets they’d like to keep, but Warren can’t tell if the truth about Weber’s death is one of them. As he gets to know his new home and grapples with the tragedy that brought him there, Warren is drawn to the people and traditions of small town Vermont, even as he finds darkness amidst the beauty.

Ancestor Mysteries, a guest post by Sarah Stewart Taylor

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  When reviewers talk about Sarah Stewart Taylor's Maggie D'arcy series, they use words like, "lyrical," "tender," "atmospheric," and "intricately plotted." And there have been a lot of reviewers - the first in the series, THE MOUNTAINS WILD, appeared on almost every Best Of list in 2020. They're calling the third in the series, THE DROWNING SEA, "rich and gothic," "gorgeous" and "heartfelt."

I'd describe the Maggie D'arcy books as novels with mysteries in them, which isn't to detract from the cunning twists and turns that unfold organically throughout the story! Rather, I read them as much for the characters, and for what the books say about love, family, difficult relationships, and coming to terms with the past.

Which brings us to today's topic! Sarah has been thinking and researching and digging into the past, and has discovered some of the most compelling questions arise from our own family histories. Who were you? Where did we come from? And how did we get from there to here?

 

 

 

In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, The Drowning Sea, Maggie, an American homicide detective who is spending the summer in Ireland with her daughter and her Irish boyfriend and his son on a remote West Cork peninsula, goes to see the place where her grandmother once lived before emigrating to America. She thinks about ancestors and legacies and mysteries and wonders why it was so important to her to stand on the piece of ground where one branch of her family tree began to grow.

 

Maggie’s experience mirrors my own visit to the spot in West Cork where my great-great grandfather and his family lived before he emigrated to Boston. My own visit was the reward at the end of a lot of genealogical sleuthing. I knew that my mother’s maternal ancestors were named McCarthy, and that her great-grandfather Michael had emigrated from Ireland, as a young child at the height of the Great Famine, I’d been told. But most of the details of his early life had been lost to the years. 

 

I discovered through newspaper archive research that Michael served in the Union Army in the Civil War, trained as a doctor, and married a Boston woman whose family had also immigrated from Ireland. He died young, only a few months after his only child, my great-grandfather Charles, was born. (Charles would go on to attend Harvard College and Harvard Law School and become Chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court. Another family mystery is how his widowed mother, a seamstress, marshaled the resources for his education.)

 

We didn’t know where in Ireland Michael came from or how he’d traveled to America. I spent almost a year following clues in documents on Ancestry.com, plugging in birth and death dates and one night, deep down a genealogy rabbit hole, I found a baptism record for Michael in the tiny townland of Shanacashel, Kilmichael Parish, West Cork. Eventually I was able to track down birth records for seven brothers and sisters. And I was able to find his naturalization records, which showed he actually arrived in Boston when he was twelve years old, in 1855, and not when he was four, as I’d been told.

 

I’ve tracked down threads of the family story on genealogical websites and in archives in Ireland and the U.S. But still hanging out there is the mystery of how he got to Boston and with whom. Ship records for the years he would have arrived are missing and the years between his arrival in Boston and his discharge from the Union Army after the Civil War are a complete mystery. I’m also fascinated by the idea of all of those brothers and sisters back in Ireland. Did any of them travel with Michael? Where are they now? While I’ve been able to locate some family members with whom I share DNA through the Ancestry.com and 23 and Me, I haven’t had any luck tracing McCarthy relatives in Ireland. But my visit to Shanacashel a couple of years ago was satisfaction of a sort. It was surprisingly meaningful to stand on the piece of Planet Earth where my great-great grandfather was born, but it also raised many new questions for me, as it does for Maggie in The Drowning Sea.

 

Speaking of DNA, chances are there are at least a couple of DNA mysteries lurking in my family tree, though I haven’t found them yet. With the sheer numbers of people contributing DNA to these databases, it makes sense that a growing number of crime novels center on genetic revelations. I’ve heard so many stories from friends about family mysteries uncovered through these sites, some with sad outcomes and some with happy ones. (I love SC Perkins’s genealogical mysteries and there are some other series that also take on secrets amongst the branches of family trees.)

 

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found I’ve only become more and more interested in family history. I’ve also become more and more aware of my own privilege in being able to find and put together at least some of the pieces of the puzzle. For adoptees in closed adoptions, researching family trees can be difficult and can open up difficult family history or lead to joyful reunions. Many Americans can’t explore these family mysteries because their ancestors were brought here enslaved or came as refugees or seeking asylum. Records were left behind or have gone missing. So many stories have been lost to trauma. When we explore one half of my husband’s family tree, we run up against many lost threads representing his Lithuanian and German Jewish ancestors who came here fleeing discrimination, pogroms and the Holocaust.

 

One of the most interesting mysteries in my family involves my ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury, who was tried and convicted as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials. She was sentenced to death but somehow escaped (this is where the mystery comes in, though there was likely an exchange of money for her freedom) and, according to some accounts, traveled to Maine with her husband, where she remained until the worst of the fervor had passed in Massachusetts. This summer I’m planning on traveling to Salisbury, Massachusetts, near Salem, to see the site of the Bradbury home.  

 

I’m looking forward to continuing to try to solve some of my family puzzles. What are the mysteries in your own family that you’ve been able to solve or are still exploring? 

JULIA:  I think Michael McCarthy's story would make a gripping historical novel, don't you, dear readers? Oh, and Sarah is giving away not one, not two, but THREE books - a signed copy of each of the Maggie D'arcy mysteries to three lucky commentors!

 

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. Her most recent book, THE DROWNING SEA, will be out June 21st. Taylor grew up on Long Island in New York and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College in Dublin. She lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. Visit her online at www.SarahStewartTaylor.com.

 

For the first time in her adult life, former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D’arcy is unemployed. No cases to focus on, no leads to investigate, just a whole summer on a remote West Cork peninsula with her teenage daughter Lilly and her boyfriend, Conor and his son. The plan is to prepare Lilly for a move to Ireland. But their calm vacation takes a dangerous turn when human remains wash up below the steep cliffs of Ross Head.

When construction worker Lukas Adamik disappeared months ago, everyone assumed he had gone home to Poland. Now that his body has been found, the guards, including Maggie's friends Roly Byrne and Katya Grzeskiewicz, seem to think he threw himself from the cliffs. But as Maggie gets to know the residents of the nearby village and learns about the history of the peninsula and its abandoned Anglo Irish manor house, once home to a famous Irish painter who died under mysterious circumstances, she starts to think there's something else going on. Something deadly. And when Lilly starts dating one of the dead man's friends, Maggie grows worried about her daughter being so close to another investigation and about what the investigation will uncover.

Old secrets, hidden relationships, crime, and village politics are woven throughout this small seaside community, and as the summer progresses, Maggie is pulled deeper into the web of lies, further from those she loves, and closer to the truth.