Sarah Stewart Taylor
Thriller
In The Drowning Sea, Sarah Stewart Taylor returns to the critically acclaimed world of Maggie D’arcy with another atmospheric mystery so vivid readers will smell the salt in the air and hear the wind on the cliffs.
For the first time in her adult life, former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D’arcy is unemployed. No cases to focus on, no leads to investigate, just a whole summer on a remote West Cork peninsula with her teenage daughter Lilly and her boyfriend, Conor and his son. The plan is to prepare Lilly for a move to Ireland. But their calm vacation takes a dangerous turn when human remains wash up below the steep cliffs of Ross Head.
When construction worker Lukas Adamik disappeared months ago, everyone assumed he had gone home to Poland. Now that his body has been found, the guards, including Maggie’s friends Roly Byrne and Katya Grzeskiewicz, seem to think he threw himself from the cliffs. But as Maggie gets to know the residents of the nearby village and learns about the history of the peninsula and its abandoned Anglo Irish manor house, once home to a famous Irish painter who died under mysterious circumstances, she starts to think there’s something else going on. Something deadly. And when Lilly starts dating one of the dead man’s friends, Maggie grows worried about her daughter being so close to another investigation and about what the investigation will uncover.
Old secrets, hidden relationships, crime, and village politics are woven throughout this small seaside community, and as the summer progresses, Maggie is pulled deeper into the web of lies, further from those she loves, and closer to the truth.
-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.
Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.
My Opinion
(2 / 5) Maggie is recently unemployed from being a homicide detective so she heads to Ireland to be with her boyfriend and their kids. While there, unexplained drownings occur and Maggie can’t help but investigate.
This one is getting great ratings so I have to assume I’m the unpopular opinion and just didn’t connect with it. It’s book 3 and I didn’t feel the need for the other books but maybe that’s why I didn’t connect to the characters? Maggie was out of the police force so she was investigating on her own time. Not being directly involved in the investigation was not as interesting. She was not tromping through crime scenes and discussing the case with forensics. I felt like I was just getting surface information. The actual hunt for clues and the killer wasn’t really there.
I really loved the details of the Irish community and surroundings. Taylor did a great job with the imagery of West Cork. All in all, the book just wasn’t for me. I needed more gritty details, more backstories and more adrenaline.
General content summary: F words: 17, xenophobia, bodies found (few details), suicide discussed as deaths, ghosts and rumors of ghosts, possible drugs and drug trafficking, suspected murder, previous drug overdose leading to death, creepy happenings in an old house, vandalism, previous suicide details, mentally unstable persons, possible suicide, infidelity, cutting/self harm, stabbing, addiction.
Thank you to Minotaur Books for the gifted copy!
The book releases June 20, 2022.
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Sorry this was disappointing!