The Drowning Sea by Sarah Stewart Taylor #bookreview #series

Thank you Minotaur Books, #partner, for the advanced copy of The Drowning Sea in exchange for my honest review.

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Published: June 21, 2022

 

Summary:

In The Drowning Sea, Sarah Stewart Taylor returns to the critically acclaimed world of Maggie D’arcy with another atmospheric mystery so vivid readers will smell the salt in the air and hear the wind on the cliffs.

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.

 

My thoughts:

This is the third book in Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series and I cannot tell you how much I love these books! They are so incredibly atmospheric and the mysteries are so encompassing.

As with all good crime fiction series lately, this one definitely can be read as a stand-alone as it does contain a self-contained case, however in order to really appreciate who Maggie is and why she has made certain choices leading up to her being unemployed, it really makes sense to read the series as a whole. But the author does do a great job of giving just enough backstory to fill you in without giving everything away, so if this is your first entry into the series, perhaps it will entice you to go back after reading this one.

This book picks up shortly after the dramatic ending of the previous book and we find Maggie at a crossroads. She is in Ireland for the summer with her daughter to decide if moving there is going to work for them when she is confronted with a case and of course cannot help but getting involved, even if that means working it from the outside.

I love Maggie’s character and I love that her initial reaction whenever confronted with a crime is to want to be involved. Because she is technically not part of the local law enforcement, she was able to pursue avenues that might not be of priority to the investigation but that she feels warrants attention.

This is a slow burning, expertly plotting mystery that really kept me on my toes. I love how all the different threads eventually came together – I’m always a fan of small-town stories that are brimming with secrets and this one was full of them! The twists and turns really kept me on my toes and no matter how much I tried to figure out where it was headed, I could not.

One of my favorite aspects of this series is how I always feel I am transported to wherever these books are set – this time on the coast of West Cork. There is such a strong sense of place throughout the book and I just love that. Ireland has long been on my list of places to visit and every time I pick up one of these books, I feel like I am there alongside the characters.

I love this series and I’m so excited to see where things go from here in the next installment!!!

 

Books in this series:

1. The Mountains Wild
2. A Distant Grave
3. The Drowning Sea
4. A Stolen Child – due out June 2023