The Drowning Sea

Taylor’s thoughtful third mystery featuring former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D’arcy (after 2021’s A Distant Grave) finds Maggie and her school-age daughter, Lilly, spending the summer on a remote peninsula in Cork with Maggie’s boyfriend, Conor, and his son, Adrien. While Maggie wrestles over whether to move to Dublin to be with Conor and uproot Lilly from friends and family in New York, developers have begun to convert a crumbling Anglo-Irish manor house into a hotel. Months earlier, Lukas Adamik was working construction on the project when he disappeared. Despite a cursory search, locals assumed that Lukas had returned to his native Poland, but after Lukas’s body is discovered off the coast, Maggie investigates and uncovers a long history involving the manor house and its inhabitants. Taylor is adept at balancing police procedure with the domestic drama of Maggie’s mixed family, and her descriptions of the Irish coast and the small town where Maggie is staying will have armchair travelers itching to grab a pint and head to the local pub. Readers will be looking forward to more from this heartfelt series. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management. (June)