Sarah Stewart Taylor

Wow. My jaw has been open this past hour, and it’s going to take a bit of time to recover from this one. Taylor weaves a story of mystery, murder, and intrigue with threads from both the past and present that come together in a brilliant tapestry of writing. The plot is insane, so many vivid details and characters that grab you, shake you, and make you question what you thought you knew. A mystery that keeps you riveted until the bitter end, I couldn’t put this book down and can’t stop show more thinking about it. Best book I’ve read in a seriously long time.
*I received an arc from the publisher through NetGalley for an honest review show less

A Boston cop who has left the city under circumstances that are both apparently traumatic and unclear moves to a small town in Vermont in 1965, where he soon gets a case. A crotchety farmer who espoused "back to the land" living (while being an incompetent farmer) has died in a fire. He apparently had been drinking, may have been composing one of his many letters to the editor complaining about something, and died after locking the door to the barn he's found in. Suicide? Maybe. There was a show more similar case not too far away by a farmer protesting the building of the interstate through his land, a modern development the dead man also opposed. But it's not an explanation the detective entirely buys...

What made the story for me was the development of characters, including a neighbor who had been involved in intelligence during the war and the dead farmer's family, back-to-the-land outcasts with a dreamy mother who grew up poor and uneducated but is drawn to write poetry. Though the town is isolated and conservative, there's a growing sense that the draft and the war protests can't be held at bay.

The pacing is not speedy, but I didn't mind a bit. The questions are not all answered, and I was fine with that, too. I'm very much looking forward to reading more about this place and these people. show less

I have to say, the worst thing about reading the first book in a new series soon after it comes out is the wait before I'll get to read the next installment. When I turned the last page of S.S. Taylor's The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon, my immediate thought was "When is the second book coming out?"

Taylor's is one of the best middle-grade adventure stories I've read in several years. It's got everything you could ask for: a quartet of smart, brave, funny teens on a show more fast-paced adventure, chased by nasties; a similar-but-different setting (America, but one without computers or electricity and with steam-powered dirigibles plus all sorts of neat little gadgets and gizmos), a world where the old maps were proven wrong and there are vast new territories out there still being explored (and exploited by the government for their natural resources and wealth). Plus, mysterious ciphered messages and secret maps leading to long-lost treasure—and more, but you'll have to read the book to find out about that. What's not to like?

More than the zippy plot and great characters, though, Taylor's book also touches on important ethical questions of resource use, the treatment of indigenous peoples and animals, &c. This is done both subtly and extremely well.

Katherine Roy's maps and illustrations are a spectacular complement to the text, and the book itself, published by McSweeney's new McMullens imprint, is simply gorgeous. The boards are covered in a nice smooth paper illustrated in full color with the key map from the book (also found on the endpapers), and the design throughout is practically flawless.

I will be awaiting the next adventures of the Expeditioners with as much patience as I can muster.

Full disclosure: The illustrator is a friend of mine, but even if I didn't know her I would have said exactly the same things about this book. Go, read it. show less

A Stolen Child, by Sarah Stewart Taylor, is an international police procedural featuring Maggie D’Arcy, a New York detective who has relocated her family and career to Dublin, Ireland. This book is the fourth in the Maggie D’Arcy series, but I enjoyed it as a standalone – although it’s made me want to read the whole series.
Maggie has trained to be a Garda, aspiring to be a detective again in this new country, and is currently assigned to community policing in Dublin. She and her show more partner are called to check on a potential Violence complaint, but the woman who answers the door says there’s no problem, it was just a loud television show. Then, a week later, the woman is found dead in her apartment, and her toddler child is missing. Maggie and her partner wonder, what did they miss on that earlier call?
Then Maggie is assigned to the detective team for the case, temporarily filling in while the team works another high-profile case. It’s a chance for her to use her detective skills and her commitment to and knowledge of the community she’s been working in. She’s also balancing the intense requirements of the case against her personal life – her daughter, her lover and his son, remodeling the lover’s home so it can be sold and they can all move to a new home together. And she’s still adjusting to Irish culture.
What I found most compelling about the book is how Maggie’s professional skills as a detective combine with the professional and personal skills in listening, observing, intuiting the spots where something is off but there’s no obvious clue. As she and the team sort through the facts and witnesses, she weighs a witnesses’ reaction against her own experience as a mother, tests someone’s statements against her sense of whether they might be lying and why.
The book is mostly dialogue – the investigators, the witnesses, the family of the victim, questioning the neighbors – and when the investigation really gets underway this technique becomes a fascinating way to show how police questioning works. It was fascinating to read the questioning and see Maggie’s reactions, her quick shifts in technique based on an unexpected answer or a small revealing physical movement, or something left unsaid. The dialogue took me right inside the police procedural process, how it works and how it feels.
The book is well plotted, and the characters are complex and very individual. It held my interest, and was hard to put down. I’m anxious to go back and read the earlier Maggie D’Arcy books in the series.

Thanks to #netgalley, #stmartinspress, and #minotaurbooks for the ARC. show less