#BookReview The Drowning Sea by Sarah Stewart Taylor @SSTaylorBooks @MinotaurBooks @StMartinsPress #MinotaurInfluencers #TheDrowningSea #SarahStewartTaylor #MaggieDArcy #SMPInfluencers Title: The Drowning Sea

Author: Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by: Minotaur Books on Jun. 21, 2022

Genres: Mystery/Thriller

Pages: 352

Format: ARC, Paperback

Source: Minotaur Books

Book Rating: 8.5/10

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.


Review:

Menacing, twisty, and intriguing!

In this latest novel by Taylor, The Drowning Sea, we head back into the life of Maggie D’Arcy, who, after recently leaving her job as a detective on Long Island, heads for a vacation in West Cork, Ireland, where things aren’t as quiet and relaxing as she hoped when the town she’s ends up staying in is rife with misfits, mayhem, a history of drug smuggling, and an estate, Rosscliffe Manor, that seems to have a lot of long-buried secrets of its own.

The writing is crisp and tight. The characters are multilayered, dependable, and tenacious. And the plot is a captivating mix of twists, turns, red herrings, secrets, deception, obsession, manipulation, malicious intentions, small-town politics, and murder.

Overall, I found The Drowning Sea to be another fabulous addition to the Maggie D’Arcy series by Taylor with its complex characters, sinister storyline, and exceptionally dramatic ending.

 

This book is available now.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.

            

 

 

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press – Minotaur Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

 

About Sarah Stewart Taylor

Sarah Stewart Taylor grew up on Long Island and was educated at Middlebury College and Trinity College, Dublin. She lives with her husband and three children on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and blueberries.

Sarah is the author of THE MOUNTAINS WILD, an atmospheric thriller about a Long Island homicide detective named Maggie D'Arcy who returns to Ireland twenty-three years after the unsolved disappearance of her beloved cousin Erin in the Wicklow Mountains. When a young woman disappears and new evidence from Erin’s case is found, Maggie will have to uncover the truth about the Irish man she's never stopped loving and, in order to help Irish police save the missing woman, the truth about who Erin was and what happened to her.

It will be published by Minotaur Books on June 23, 2020.

Sarah is also the author of the Sweeney St. George mystery series, about an art historian who studies funerary art, "the art of death," from Minotaur Books. The first book in the series, O’ Artful Death, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

Her non-fiction has been published in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and many other publications.

Photograph courtesy of Author's Goodreads Page.