Agony Hill

By Sarah Stewart Taylor

Minotaur Books 2024

Sarah Stewart Taylor sets her new mystery, Agony Hill, in 1965 Vermont, but if you don’t like historical fiction (or, maybe more pointedly, still don’t want to admit that the 1960s count), you needn’t worry. Not only has most of Vermont not changed much since 1965, but Taylor doesn’t exactly lay on the historical details. People don’t have cell phones. Appallingly, some homes don’t yet have phones. But aside from that, there are neither details nor, mercifully, anachronisms to bother the present-minded reader. 

Instead, mystery lovers will be presented immediately with a whole slew of warmly recognizable elements. There’s the fish-out-of-water: Franklin Warren has just arrived in Bethany, Vermont to take a job offer from a friend: he’ll be a detective with the state police, who are seeing more and more activity as crime makes its way north to the hamlets and forests of Vermont. There’s also the baptism-of-fire: Warren no sooner has his shoes on in Bethany before there’s an emergency, a fire at a farm called Agony Hill (another familiar element: hammy portentous place-names). Help has rushed madly from all sides to save the barn and its store of hay, but in the half-charred building cops have found a dead body, the farm’s owner Hugh Weber. And that introduces another familiar element: a locked-door mystery. Weber was found dead on a cot, and the barn was locked from the inside. 

The fire leaves chaos in its wake, and Taylor writes it all at a curiously satisfying amble that matches her rustic setting. Readers get to know Warren gradually, and he gets to know both the personalities and the nature of his new setting just as gradually. The odd ways of Vermonters from a generation ago are lightly sketched; the procedures of the local police are lightly sketched; Warren’s own personality, dogged, not particularly bright, slightly haunted by his own tragedies, is lightly sketched. For a book with a burned corpse at its center, Agony Hill is often oddly light book. 

It deepens in only a few places. Hugh Weber’s will leaves the farm to his wife Sylvie and only a copy of The Communist Manifesto to his brother Victor, adding, “Perhaps it will do something to educate him as to his bloodthirsty capitalist impulses and how he might temper them.” Which not only kicks off a series of enjoyable red herrings (Victor doesn’t take it well) but also reminds readers that they’d really like to have known Hugh Weber. 

Sylvie Weber is another one of those deeper places; she’s easily the book’s best-drawn character, a pregnant widow, a firm but caring mother to her young children, a pragmatic farmer (when she has to shoot an injured ewe, she gets the red herrings going again by complacently telling Warren “I don’t mind killing, when it’s the kindest thing”). Taylor does a wonderfully delicate job of noticing the building connections between Sylvie and Warren, especially when the landscape of Vermont helps out:

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 top of the hills, leaving the sky bloody behind it, the red and purple spreading out across the expanse. They couldn’t help themselves; they stood and looked at it until it seemed to be fading and then she wordlessly led him back toward the house.

“They had shared it,” Taylor writes, “the beauty of the sunset, which would never be repeated, and he felt tied to her.” 

Agony Hill itself is more broadly like this scene, by-the-numbers procedure of clues and tension and secondary crimes and little revelations, all punctuated by oddly random memorable moments of quiet revelation. It’s confident that it doesn’t need narrative tricks to keep the reader interested, and that confidence is not misplaced. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News