Sarah Stewart Taylor's The Drowning Sea

 

Margaret S. Hamilton

 

The Drowning Sea, the third novel in Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy mystery series, takes place in a small Irish village. Maggie, an unemployed Long Island homicide detective and recent widow, is spending the summer in Ireland with her teenage daughter. Her Irish boyfriend and his teenage son complete their vacation household.

 

The remote West Cork peninsula setting becomes a character in Taylor’s book, where much of the action takes place on the cliff tops:

 

The narrow trail disappears into the low grass, as though whoever or whatever walked there before us suddenly disappeared, or turned around, or rose up into the sky like an angel. Far below the path, the coastline curls and winds around the base of the cliffs, a brilliant blue scarf of water, edged with lacy white surf. (p.1)

 

As Maggie wrestles with her decision to make a permanent move to Ireland, she becomes involved in Garda investigations of two suspicious deaths of Polish immigrants, a construction worker and a pub waitress. Maggie is drawn to a decaying Anglo-Irish manor, Rosscliffe House, which harbors old secrets and present-day skullduggery.

 

Taylor uses stones to symbolize her narrative of past and present. A woman who worked at the manor house forty years earlier states:

 

There’s something about that place, about the cliffs. I don’t believe places are haunted…But I do believe that secrets and shame, well, they end up being nearly the same thing, don’t they? They infect a place, get into the very stone of it. (p.296)

 

After Maggie locates the stone foundation of the house where her grandmother lived before emigrating to America, she tells her lover:

 

I’m thinking about how rocks hold memories, how we build houses out of rocks, how this house would have held all the history of the people who built it, all the people who collected the rocks. When they built Rosscliffe House, they used rocks that already had a history in them and so maybe they were doomed to fail, those Cromwellian planters and everyone who came after, because they couldn’t own the rocks; the rocks already had a life. (p.270)

 

An underlying subplot concerns Maggie’s permanent move to Dublin. During a brief visit, Maggie walks the city streets, envisioning herself as a resident:

 

It feels like a homecoming now, the little lanes familiar and some of the shops and pubs ones that I now have associations with. I stop to listen to a busker playing the tarantella on an acoustic guitar and the music tugs at me, invoking a strange sense of déjà vu. How does a place start to feel like home? I guess it’s those associations, the connection of emotionally fraught experiences to a place that fixes it in your mind. (p.236-7)

 

Taylor makes effective use of a first-person present tense. Though most of the book is from Maggie’s perspective, Taylor weaves in short chapters from the point of view of Garda investigators and other secondary characters. Approaching the climax, the antiphonal point of view chapters build and sustain tension, leading to a cataclysmic clash on the clifftops.

 

Sarah Stewart Taylor writes masterful traditional mysteries. I’m eagerly anticipating the next book in her Maggie D’Arcy series.