Sarah Stewart Taylor's AGONY HILL

 

 

 

By Margaret S. Hamilton

 

“That was how it was with other human beings. Until you started digging, you only ever saw snapshots of their lives. Even then, you had to remember that there were things that happened out of sight. You never really knew what happened when you weren’t there.” (p.103)

 

 

I enjoyed Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series, set on Long Island and in Ireland, and was curious to read Agony Hill, the first in her new series with Vermont State Police detective Franklin Warren.

 

In 1965, Bethany, Vermont is on the cusp of societal change. Young men are called up for the Vietnam draft. Interstate 91, which connects rural villages in the Connecticut River Valley with points south, is under construction. Teenagers raised on local farms leave the area to find work. Though voter and civil rights legislation is now law, the upheaval of the sixties is still distant in this farming community.

 

Warren is grieving, starting a new life in a rural area after a deadly attack on his wife in Boston.  He is frustrated by the many secrets Bethany residents hold. With patience, he starts to make connections between recent house and barn fires in the area, two murders, and a mysterious bearded man who lives in the woods surrounding the local farms.

 

In addition to Warren’s point of view, Taylor uses two other alternating points of view in her novel—Alice Bellows, his retired neighbor, and Sylvie Weber, a recent widow whose husband was either murdered or committed suicide.

 

Alice’s late husband served in the OSS during World War II. After unofficially performing intelligence errands for him, Alice continues to keep in touch with his colleagues. She learns a political refugee writer—perhaps based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who resided in Cavendish, VT from 1976-1994—has moved to the area, and suspects recent events might be related to providing security for the writer.

 

French-Canadian Sylvie Weber is a shy, reclusive poet and mother to four boys. Warren attempts to build trust with her and finally learn the circumstances of her husband’s death.

 

In the first of her Bethany, Vermont series, Taylor establishes her central characters and potential future plots: Franklin Warren shows empathy and respect for the townspeople as he learns the history of the town, enabling him to solve several related crimes. Warren is a widower and a loner who reminds me of Krueger’s Cork O’Connor and Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Russ Van Alstyne. Warren acknowledges Alice’s amateur sleuthing proclivities as well as her husband’s OSS affiliation. Alice will be useful to him. Warren is mesmerized by Sylvie, but constrained by the circumstances of her husband’s death.

 

Taylor neatly links her characters’ internal points of view to the landscape in some striking passages, including this interaction between Sylvie and Warren:

 

She wiped her hands on her dress, picked up a basket, and looked at him one more time from behind the fence before coming around through the gate and meeting him on the other side. The sun had dropped farther toward the horizon—indeed, it seemed to be gathering speed, hurtling toward the tops of the hills, leaving the sky bloody behind it, the red and purple spreading out across the expanse. (p.228)

 

In Agony Hill, Sarah Stewart Taylor has created a memorable setting and characters set in mid-sixties rural Vermont. I look forward to reading the next in the series.

 

Readers, what aspects of a new series do you enjoy? Writers, what is your focus when you start creating a new series?

 

Margaret S. Hamilton’s debut traditional mystery, What the Artist Left Behind, is on submission.

Read more about her Jericho Mysteries and thirty-plus published short stories on her website:

 

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