Sarah Stewart Taylor: A Distant Grave
The second in Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series follows her elegiac first outing, The Mountains Wild, my favorite read of 2020. Maggie is a Long Island homicide cop, but as the first novel explored, she has deep roots in Ireland. In the first novel she searches for her long lost cousin’s killer; in the second novel, the crime occurs up the street from her home, but the roots of the story again take her back to Ireland.
She’s left behind a new-old flame in Ireland and has been planning a long vacation there with her daughter to visit him, but she catches a homicide case two days before they plan to leave. When it turns out the victim was Irish, she figures she can combine business and pleasure, and her boss gives her leave to take off.