The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by Minotaur Books on June 23, 2020

Lucid prose makes it easy to follow the complex plot that carries a murder mystery across two continents and 23 years. The story jumps between two time periods as the protagonist tries to understand the circumstances that led to Erin Flaherty’s disappearance and presumed death.

Erin was raised in Long Island but she always had a strong interest in her family’s Irish history, in part because her father, Danny Flaherty, ran the kind of Irish bar that quietly passed the hat to support the IRA. She decides to visit Ireland in 1993, ostensibly to enjoy her youth. Her cousin Maggie D’Arcy eventually realizes that she had another motive.

Erin finds a place to stay in Dublin, where she is visited by some backpacking friends, including Brian Lombardi, who will marry Maggie and have a daughter with her before they divorce. Maggie bears a striking resemblance to Erin. They grew up as best friends.

Not long after the disappearance, Maggie goes to Dublin to look for Erin. Retracing Erin’s journeys, Maggie discovers that Erin had visited the Wicklow Mountains and made a return visit shortly before she disappeared. Other evidence suggests that Erin traveled to Dublin after her second visit to the mountains, but Maggie is poking around mountain paths when she finds Erin’s beloved necklace, making Maggie fear foul play. A German girl went missing in the area at about the same time, creating the fear of a serial killer. Unfortunately, neither Maggie nor the police can find an explanation for Erin’s disappearance.

In 2016, a Galway girl named Niamh Horrigan disappears in the mountains, potentially the latest victim of the serial killer. As the police search for her, they find human remains and a scarf that may have belonged to Erin. Danny doesn’t have the strength to go to Ireland himself so he asks Maggie to meet with the Irish police. By this point, Maggie has been a police officer for 20 years. She meets with Roly Byrne, the Irish cop who befriended her in 1993. After skillfully sidestepping Irish cops who want to freeze her out of the case, Maggie is given a consulting role that includes access to evidence concerning similar murders over the course of almost three decades. The key suspect seems to be Naill Deasey, but he wasn’t living in the mountains when all the murders were committed.

While the story follows a familiar crime thriller formula — girl goes missing, the protagonist must find her before her abductor causes her death — Sarah Stewart Taylor invigorates the story with the kind of detail that makes the formula seem fresh. Some clues point to the truth while others misdirect, causing both Maggie and the reader to wonder where the truth lies. The killer’s identity comes as a surprise, at least to me, although the information needed to solve the whodunit comes fairly late in the story. The parallel stories in 1993 and 2016 allow the two tracks of the story to merge effectively, eventually making clear that Maggie has more than one mystery to solve. The plot is surprisingly tight. Despite weaving together multiple characters, deaths, and time frames, it leaves no loose ends dangling.

Maggie engages in a bit too much handwringing for my taste. When the blurb compares Taylor to Tana French and Kate Atkinson, perhaps handwringing protagonists are what the blurb writer has in mind, but unlike French and Atkinson, Taylor does not make her protagonist’s anger with an unfair world unbearably sanctimonious. I liked the plot of The Mountains Wild more than I liked the protagonist, but the plot is reason enough to read the book.

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