A Distant Grave by Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by ‎ Minotaur Books on June 22, 2021

Sarah Stewart Taylor understands the mechanics of storytelling. She tells her stories with fluid prose. That display of talent overcame my reservations about The Mountains Wild, the first book in the Maggie D’Arcy series. It isn’t quite enough to earn a full recommendation for the second book, A Distant Grave.

Maggie is a homicide detective in Long Island. In the first novel, Maggie traveled to Ireland, the home of her ancestors, and solved the disappearance of her cousin twenty years earlier. She made friends with some Irish cops and developed a love interest.

In the second novel, Maggie has planned a vacation to Ireland so she can shag her Irish boyfriend (my interpretation of the trip, although Taylor presents it in a more romantic light). Before she leaves, a man is murdered in a park. Maggie is worried that she won’t be able to take her trip because, it seems, she is the queen of Long Island homicides and therefore indispensable. I found that difficult to accept since Maggie doesn’t seem to have any deductive or procedural abilities that are beyond those of typical police detectives. When she isn’t using her work hours to take care of her personal problems, she’s giving mundane assignments to other cops. The qualities that make Maggie so special are difficult to recognize. In any event, by a happy coincidence, the murder victim turns out to be visiting from Ireland, giving Maggie a chance to combine work with pleasure, although her vacation turns out to be mostly work, much to the consternation of her boyfriend and daughter.

Taylor’s development of Maggie’s character focuses on how much she loves her daughter, how guilty she feels about disappointing her daughter and boyfriend because of her commitment to work, and how she worries that she won’t be able to make a life with her boyfriend because her job is in America and he doesn’t want to leave Ireland. Long distance relationships never work and Maggie should probably understand that, but Taylor’s instinct is mix a romance novel with a crime novel. In romance novels, love conquers all, so perhaps there is hope for Maggie. By the book’s end, I was so tired of Maggie fretting about her woes that I didn’t care. Nor did I care about Maggie’s tedious concern that she can’t be the supermom she wants to be despite telling her teenage daughter at every opportunity how much she is loved. All of that is meant to build characterization, but it isn’t terribly engaging and it seriously distracts from the story’s development. Perhaps insecure moms will have a different take on Maggie than mine.

Maggie is distracting in other ways, as well. She frets about an ongoing threat from a fellow who drove past her house, although that storyline eventually fizzles out, accomplishing nothing apart from giving Maggie another source of anxiety. Maggie frequently feels the need to tell us how her boyfriend smells, presumably to let us know how important everything about him is to his existence. One day he smells like rain and dog. Another day his deodorant smells green and his laundry detergent smells fluffy. Are green and fluffy even scents? It turns out that I don’t care.

The plot relies on too many coincidences. The story is needlessly convoluted. It involves the victim’s work for a humanitarian organization, his experience as a hostage in Afghanistan some years earlier, his rescuer, and a couple of politicians who feel the need to cover things up that, in a time when the public shrugs off scandals, could as easily have been ignored. A related murder occurs while Maggie is visiting Ireland. If her Irish cop buddies had any sense, they would tell her to stay home since her visits portend trouble, but they can’t because she’s just so loveable and perfect, even as she worries that she’s just not perfect enough.

The novel works a perceived social problem into the plot. Babies in Ireland who were born to a woman out of wedlock were given to a Catholic orphanage so the mothers could avoid shame. The babies were shipped to America where they were placed for adoption with Catholic families. Maggie is outraged about this, not because unwanted children were given the loving parents they deserved (which seems like a good thing), but because the children were not told they were Irish by birth. This seems to me to be a failure of the adoptive parents who kept that fact a secret, not a systemic evil that traces to Ireland, but the novel is largely driven by Maggie’s sense that all the players (other than the adoptive parents) were part of a monstrous plot to deprive babies of their Irish identity. In the grand scheme of social problems, I found it hard to share Maggie’s outrage.

So we have a well written novel with an unlikable protagonist and a convoluted plot that depends on unlikely coincidences and misplaced moral outrage. A Distant Grave isn’t awful but to continue reading the series, I would need to care about Maggie D’Arcy. I just don’t, so this will be the end of the series for me. Fans of romance novels that are driven by women who prevail despite their self-doubt might love this series, so as always, your mileage may vary.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS