The Mountains Wild
By Sarah Stewart Taylor
Minotaur Books, 2020

The Mountains Wild is a bubbling broth of a book. It’s a paean to Ireland. It’s a love letter to its inhabitants in all their multifaceted splendor. It made me homesick for Dublin. It’s the first entry in a new series featuring homicide detective Maggie D’arcy  A divorced mother of one, she’s evolved into an ace investigator. She first earned high marks from her colleagues and kudos from the brass by solving a case involving a notorious serial killer that baffled the FBI. What continues to baffle Maggie is her cousin Erin’s disappearance. 

In 1993, Maggie D’arcy’s cousin Erin Flaherty left her home on Long Island for an impromptu trip to Dublin. She vanished while exploring Wicklow, a region 12 miles south of Dublin that is known for its namesake mountains. Maggie traveled there to look for Erin. She spent weeks retracing Erin’s last days. She finds her cousin’s broken necklace but no other tangible clues.  She discovers a troubling IRA connection which only raises more questions about Erin’s last minute trip. In the end, neither she nor the Irish police, The Garda, especially one Garda Detective Roland “Roly” Byrne, could find her and Maggie was forced to depart in defeat.

Maggie and Erin were as close as sisters. Erin lived with Maggie’s family on and off for years. Erin knew very little about her absentee mother, Brenda, except that she was Irish. Maggie’s mom confided to her that Brenda had trouble staying in one place. Erin had that in common with her mother. She went to Ireland in 1993, in search of her roots. Erin’s dad, Danny, owns Flaherty’s, a quintessential Irish bar, a second home to Erin and Maggie that we see through Maggie’s eyes: 

I look up at the framed photographs and posters on the walls of the bar: Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams, the tricolor, a framed copy of Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” some newer stuff too: A Michael Collins movie poster, a signed and framed Dropkick Murphy’s album. The standard American Irish bar kit.

The abortive search for Erin changes Maggie’s life. Instead of pursuing academia (she had gone to Notre Dame for English and focused on Irish studies) she feels called to become a detective: 

There were these two cops, detectives on the organized crime squad, and they came into my uncle’s bar all the time and I loved listening to them discussing their cases…. The homicide squad is my place. I love it there.

Then Uncle Danny receives a call from Detective Byrne requesting that Maggie call him as soon as possible. Roly tells her that they’ve found a scarf “printed with butterflies.” It was found by investigators searching for a woman named Niamh Horrigan. Maggie knows the scarf, she had given it to Erin for Christmas. The authorities fear that a serial killer is at work and that Niamh may be his latest hostage. Niamh disappeared in the same area where Erin was last thought to be. Maggie heads back to Ireland. 

Upon arriving in Dublin, she reconnects with Roly Byrne, and becomes a temporary member of his investigative team. Together, they race to unravel the links between Erin’s case and Niamh’s. Plus, now a gifted profiler, Maggie is able to internalize massive amounts of information and sort it out into patterns—to triangulate. That’s the expertise she brings to the reopening of Erin’s case and the recent one involving Niamh. 

Taylor skillfully switches time periods from 1993 to 2016 in this splendid, atmospheric mystery that artfully blends the history and romance of Ireland with a contemporary police investigation. The Irish setting is so vividly evoked that you can practically hear that dulcet brogue, taste the Guinness and smell the peat fires. The Mountains Wild is a beautifully plotted novel that builds to a stunning, unforgettable conclusion.

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.