Author profile: sarah stewart taylor 

“This book, in many ways, was a way for me to get back in touch with the part of my life where I lived in Ireland,” Taylor explains. “I spent a very happy few years in my 20s working in

Dublin and then going to graduate school over there. When I was researching this book, I started traveling back quite frequently and getting back in touch with friends over there and

spending a lot of time there. … You need to get there and see exactly the way the sun hits the grass on the mountains or the way that it smells in a particular neighborhood and the sounds.”

Taylor’s blending of those scenic details, along with the history and romance of Ireland, provides a stark yet illuminating contrast to the darker themes and human tendencies of the book:

murder, violence. “If you’re a crime writer, you’re drawn to the darkness in human beings,” she says. “Part of what’s interesting to me about exploring character through crime fiction is to

ask that question that most of us don’t like to think about very much, which is, What would drive a human being to kill another human being? It’s like it’s the ultimate tear in the fabric of

all of the social structures we’ve created, and yet it happens more frequently than we like to think about.” Taylor says her favorite crime novels “explore that darkness, but they also

explore the light. They explore love, and they explore people standing up for one another and people saving other people. It’s that juxtaposition of the darkness and then the other parts of

the human experience that go along with it.” After majoring in English in college, with a creative writing minor, Taylor worked as a journalist and a writing teacher but always had a dream

of producing a novel. “I remember on January 1 one year I just said, I’m going to try to write a mystery, and I’m going to work on it every day and see what happens,” she says. “That’s where

my first mystery came from.” Taylor’s writing style has been compared to that of Tana French and Kate Atkinson, two of her favorite mystery novelists. Who else does she read? “You have

layers of influences, and certainly the first mysteries I read were Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers and some of those golden age detective novelists,” she says. “I feel

like I learned a lot from them just in terms of constructing mystery plots. Then I loved P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, some of those more contemporary British mystery writers from the ’70s

and ’80s.” There was also a point when she discovered “women private-eye novels and more hard-boiled stuff,” she says, as well as UK crime writers, such as Ann Cleeves [AARP members can read

 _The Long Call_ by Ann Cleeves here], and New England crime writers, like Archer Mayor. “There are just so many great books that are being written right now in the field. It’s really

exciting. I feel like I’m reading novels that also push the boundaries of crime fiction a little bit that are maybe more thriller-y, and that’s been really fun, too.” A self-described

“morning writer,” Taylor says her “ideal situation would be that I could get up at 4 a.m. every morning and just write locked in my office from 4 until 11.” Being an early bird also suits

Taylor’s other job: She lives with her family on a farm in Vermont, where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. “Sheep are great because for a lot of the year, they’re pretty low

maintenance,” she says. “They’re out on pasture, and we just have to make sure they have water, and we’re checking on them, but they kind of take care of themselves, but during lambing

season it’s very intensive.” During that three-week lambing season every year, Taylor is up in the middle of the night, multiple times, checking on the sheep and helping to deliver lambs — a

far cry from the sedentary lifestyle of a writer. Yet, the combination of the two livelihoods helps to keep her balanced. “I find it really satisfying. There’s something so wonderful about

when I’m struggling with a book and I don’t know where the plot’s going next and I feel like I’m terrible at it and, Why did anyone ever publish me? What am I even doing here? And then going

outside and feeding the animals and watering the animals and feeling like I have done something concrete. I have made these animals happy. They will survive. I’ve accomplished something

today.”