by Sarah Stewart Taylor ★★★☆☆
I am a big Sarah Stewart Taylor fan. After her debut "Maggie D'Arcy" novel, The Mountains Wild, clocked in as my #2 book of 2020, and she followed it up with another strong offering, A Distant Grave (my #9 book of 2021), I declared that I was "happy to say that Sarah Stewart Taylor is for real!" Well, maybe not so fast.
As with other books in a series, I promise not to spoil anything about this book. However, if you're reading a review for the 3rd book in a series without reading any of the others, stop now! Go read The Mountains Wild -- it's great -- and pop back here once you've finished that *and* A Distant Grave. Mild spoilers for those two books will be included in the review below.
**SPOILERS BELOW for The Mountains Wild and A Distant Grave (but not for The Drowning Sea)**
Just as she did with Book 2, Taylor picks up Maggie's story shortly after the events of the previous book. The Drowning Sea is set entirely in Ireland this time. Detective Maggie D'Arcy is fresh off the events of A Distant Grave, which saw her formally resign from her position as a detective on the homicide squad of the Suffolk County (Long Island) Police Department. For the first time in a long time, she has nowhere she has to be and nothing to focus on other than her family. As such, she has decided to take her daughter Lilly to Ireland to spend the summer months in West Cork living with Maggie's boyfriend Conor and Conor's son Adrien.
Like with other novels set in small Irish towns (Tana French's The Searcher comes to mind), most of the town knows who Maggie is within a day of her arrival. The quartet are staying in a cottage near the bluffs, and they quickly learn some of the history of the place -- how the town was struggling until the "Big House" in town was sold to a developer who is turning it into a hotel and building ten upscale residences to pair with it. That influx of dedicated capital toward bringing residents and tourists to the town has also infused life into the town, with new businesses starting to spring up. Like with any place that sees change and growth, some of the residents are in favor of it, and some are vehemently opposed.
The crux of the mystery in The Drowning Sea focuses on a young Polish worker who body turns up on the shore shortly after Maggie arrives in town. He had been missing for months and was presumed to have gone back to Poland. The death hits most of the town hard, since everyone knew him in some capacity, and questions arise about whether his death was suicide, and accident, or an outright murder. Taylor balances that central mystery with a number of other side stories: another death (was it suicide or was it murder?) that takes place; a missing woman from the past and a potential haunting of The Big House; a burgeoning love story between Lilly and the Polish lead singer of a local band; and a potential drug operation that has afflicted the town for the last decade. Of course, Maggie is not licensed in Ireland, and so she's mostly on the sidelines for all of these, and acts less like an investigator and more like a narrator. But she's still a detective at heart and so naturally she gets a bit involved.
It's a lot to juggle, and the result is that the story ends up getting a bit muddled. Rather than a dogged pursuit of the central mystery, it branches in directions that in some cases felt unnecessary. There's nothing terribly wrong with The Drowning Sea, but it's a fairly significant step down from Taylor's previous two books. It feels like there were perhaps one too many storylines she wanted to explore, and some didn't really pan out in a way that made them seem to be worth the invested time. While the central mystery is compelling enough and satisfyingly resolved, this felt more like a bridge book to get Maggie to Ireland on a full time basis. Overall, this is a "high 3 / low 4" for me, and after giving it time to settle, I think it bumps down a star mostly due to my inflated expectations from the first two books. I'm not giving up on the series, though; instead, I will reset those expectations before I dig into A Stolen Child (the 4th book in the series) and hopefully the story gets back on firmer footing.