Sarah Stewart Taylor's A STOLEN CHILD

 

By Margaret S. Hamilton

 

Sometimes when you’re investigating a homicide, the victim becomes alive to you, and you forget that you never knew them when they were breathing. You forget that they weren’t leaving messages for you, because they never knew you. (p.184)

 

 

Sarah Stewart Taylor recently published the fourth book in her Maggie D’Arcy series. Set in Dublin a year after the events in her third book, Maggie has completed Garda training and is a community police officer on street patrol in the Portobello neighborhood. A few days after Maggie and her partner respond to a domestic disturbance, they are summoned to the same address where a young woman is found dead. Maggie notices the absence of the victim’s toddler and the hunt is on for the missing child.

 

Maggie is assigned to a criminal investigation squad working in tandem with a larger case. She’s an experienced detective and mother who wades into a sea of suspects, including the murdered mother’s family members, neighborhood friends, and the management at the victim’s former modeling agency. Maggie also takes advantage of the observations and insights of a gang of teenagers roaming the Portobello neighborhood. Maggie excels at reading emotions. She can tell when a witness lies. And she feels an overwhelming compulsion to identify both the murderer of young mother and the kidnapper of the young mother’s child.

 

Instead of writing her usual lyrical descriptive passages about the landscape of rural Ireland, Taylor focuses on the trendy Portobello neighborhood, a close-in suburb south of the center of Dublin, bounded by the Grand Canal. Many of the houses are undergoing gentrification, the streets lined with restaurants, bars, and design studios. Portobello has layers of history, including when it was the nineteenth century center of Jewish life in Dublin.

 

Maggie and her romantic partner, Conor, are likeable and engaging characters, building a blended family with their two teenage children while their home undergoes major reconstruction. Taylor includes a charming subplot: the contractor finds old photos of individuals Maggie presumes are the past owners of the house. Maggie and Conor identify the people in the photographs and return the photos to their descendants.

 

Justice is served, and Maggie briefly returns to her days as a beat copper before her next assignment.

 

I enjoyed watching this Book Passage interview of Sarah Stewart Taylor:

Sarah Stewart Taylor discusses The Stolen Child - YouTube

 

I learned that Taylor is now writing the fifth book in the Maggie D’Arcy series, in which Maggie becomes a member of a Garda homicide investigation unit. The action starts six weeks after her fourth book ends.

 

Readers and writers, when you are reading a series, do you anxiously await the next book?