Author Sarah Stewart Taylor finds inspiration in Vermont. But her books, from the Sweeney St. George series — set in New England — to the Maggie D’arcy series — set in Ireland and Long Island, paint her love for mysteries and crime fiction. Her newest, “Agony Hill” [Macmillan, 315pgs] is the first in a new series set in rural Vermont in the 1960s. She just finished the second book in the series: “Hunter’s Heart Ridge” set to be released in August 2025. Taylor talked with the Banner about approach, process, details and her muse that is Vermont.
Taylor says that her books always start with setting. “I think setting is perhaps one of the most important elements for me in sort of conceiving of an idea for a book and certainly in developing the characters.” From there, Taylor says she is able to figure out what the themes and motifs are that she is working with. She relates that the first book in her first series (with the protagonist Sweeney St. George) was set in Vermont and then some of the others were in Massachusetts. “Those books were very tied to setting, because they were about an art historian who specialized in gravestone art so they [partially] took place in old cemeteries.” As a result, Taylor adds, the plots of the books and the characters were very much driven by where the cemetery was that her character was studying.
Her second series (following Maggie D’arcy) was set in Ireland, “which is a place that’s very important to me. I lived there for a few years in my 20s and went to graduate school in Dublin.” That series, Taylor explains, is about an American homicide detective with ties to Ireland. D’arcy goes about detecting crimes and exploring her own heritage and family history in Ireland. “So obviously the setting in those books [as well] is really, really key to me.” With this new series, starting with “Agony Hill,” Taylor says she had been wanting to write another book set in Vermont for a long time. “And I had this fascination with the 1960s period and sort of how things were changing during that [time].”
She says one of the biggest changes was that Vermont went from being a place where it took a long time to get to from Boston or New York on little back roads to the coming of the interstate highway system. “Vermont became much less remote and more accessible.” Taylor adds that this was a particular characteristic of the setting in this new book, “and, in many ways, will drive the whole series, because the series is about people grappling with those changes that are coming to small towns in Vermont.”
Setting the series in the 1960s also takes away the shortcuts used in more recent mystery novels including forensic DNA analysis. “Exactly. That was one of the things that I really wanted to do in this series,” explains Taylor. She says in her D’arcy series, it was really fun to research modern policing and homicide detection methods and forensics. Taylor adds though “that there is a way in which all of that technology, to some extent, removes the detective from the process because it’s happening in labs and in other places.” Taylor explains that it was really was fun to go back to a time “when you didn’t just have these very easily accessible answers about DNA, cell phone location, satellite location, and all of that.” As a result, she says the characters in this specific series have to use more psychology-based approaches “and old-fashioned intuition.” She says that can be a mixed bag since some of those approaches can be less reliable. “And there’s a lot of bias in the system in the 1960s period. We can probably find a lot of police work [then] that maybe was less than accurate. But it’s just really interesting to me to kind of go back to that, to that period and have characters rely on themselves more.”
The latter part of the 1960s was also a cross point in the civil rights movement and the Vietnam draft. “I talked to a lot of people who were living here [at that time] and I read a lot of local newspapers, including yours, for this time period.” Taylor says that there is so much information that can be gleaned, not just from the news stories, but the classified ads, the ads for clothing, what people were wearing and buying and how much they were paying for it. She adds that the social columns were also an incredible resource because it really gave a sense of what was happening in the collective consciousness.
“In the second book in the series [‘Hunter’s Heart Ridge’] which I just finished…I actually set it at a men’s hunting and fishing club. There’s a suspicious death there. And at this hunting club, many of these men fought in World War Two and are variously involved with the military and the government.” The question she poses is: Does Vietnam mean something to them? “And then there’s their sons, who are there too…and the sons have a completely different feeling and approach about the growing war.” Taylor says she has loved kind of exploring that generational split, “because I think that was a real hallmark of the 60s…this chasm that opened up between generations.”
Loyalty and family is a big part of “Agony Hill” as well. In the book, a newfound widow Sylvie goes to great lengths to protect her son. And yet the protagonist of the book, a newly transferred Detective Warren, protects in a wholly different way, which points to the divide of matriarchal versus patriarchal society at that time. “That’s so interesting, because I don’t know that I actually thought very explicitly about that. But they do right? There’s a way [about] Sylvie, who doesn’t have a lot of power in any way [at the time]. She’s a woman. She’s now a widow. She comes from a poor background. She wants to protect her son and she does it in the only way that she knows how. But ultimately, it’s Warren, who does have power in the society, who kind of is able to fight it. It’s through his actions [that protection is actually achieved]. I hadn’t thought about that.”
Sylvie, as a crucial crux point of the novel, is “based on a lot of women I know, both of that generation, and of my generation [as well] who just, in a quiet way, gets stuff done because she has to. She’s just does it. She’s caring for her family. She’s taking care of the farm. She has a creative pursuit that she’s trying to work on. But nobody kind of notices her in a way. And yet she’s absolutely kind of a superhero.” Taylor wanted to make sure that came across in the character. “At that time, women’s roles were opening up, and they were more constrained than they are now certainly, but [Sylvie] had to find her way. “
One way Taylor was able to do this is that she introduced Sylvie as a poet in the prologue. This way Taylor was able to introduce Sylvie’s family: her boys and her husband to the reader before Warren meets her as a crime victim or possibly a suspect. “I thought it felt like just putting her in her own world in the beginning was the way to do that. And do love a misdirection. I love making the reader think that one thing is going to happen, and in fact, it’s something else.” In this case, she says, it is also about the environment intruding in a way. “I like the idea of having this very peaceful place that almost seems to exist in another age or another world, and then having it interrupted by an element from the outside which kind of introduces menace and something that’s going to interrupt that peace.” Taylor says that’s a pretty good metaphor for this period in history of Vermont. “There were these very remote places that did seem to sort of exist in another time.” The changes of course happened because of different causes including the expansion of the interstate system
One of the events she integrates into the book (though under a fictional) is the reality of Romaine Tenney, a Vermont farmer whose farm was seized by eminent domain in order to build Interstate 91. Instead of watching bulldozers tear down his home and farm buildings, Tenney decided to burn them down himself and died inside. “That actually happened. The film that was made about Romaine Tenney is an incredible thing. When I was a reporter many years ago at the Valley News, I was assigned to write a story about it. “ She says, at that point, Tenney’s family was considering some sort of monument in recognition of him. “And I wrote a story about it. I didn’t know the story then but I talked to a lot of people about it.” She says she thinks the reason that people are so fascinated by it years later is that Tenney was such a symbol of these kind of two Vermonts, “the way things had been, and then whatever was coming.” At that time, Taylor adds, nobody knew exactly how the interstate would change life in Vermont, but people knew it would. “Tenney stood up as the symbol of resistance to that change. Some people see him as a hero. Some people really have a lot of sorrow for him, just as a human being who who was struggling with this. And then probably other people think of him as just crazy.” All those aspects fascinated Taylor, “in just all the different ways that people saw him. I think, in an earlier draft, I actually used his name, and then I decided that I wouldn’t, partly because I didn’t want to speak for him and I didn’t want to assume any knowledge of what he was thinking. And yet anybody who knows Vermont history knows that [those aspects] was based on an actual event.” This reason fixes directly into the focal mystery point at the center of “Agony Hill.”
This brings the conversation back to ideas about voice and perspective. “So my Irish series [with D’Arcy] is first person present tense. So we are right in my main character’s head the entire time, and seeing things unfold as she sees them unfold. And it’s fun to write that way. It’s very immediate, and you’re kind of right there with the character.” She says she has a few third person chapters in those books, but mostly, she says, “we’re with the main character, and so you kind of don’t have the benefit of other characters’ knowledge.” With “Agony Hill” and this new continuing series, Taylor says she really wanted it to be almost more an ensemble piece. “I wanted to have different characters who would see the story kind of happening through all of their experiences.” She adds that she also wanted there to be a little bit more of a narrative voice. “It’s not exactly an omniscient narrator, because we stay pretty close. There’s a kind of a narrator who’s telling us what these characters are up to. And as I was writing, I almost thought of that narrator as the town, kind of observing all these things that are happening.”
With the second book of the series that Taylor just completed, Detective Warren is still the main protagonist at the center. “In fact, in the second book in the series, he arrives [back] when there is an early season snowstorm, and gets stranded at this hunting and fishing club with this group of suspects.” Taylor also is specific to mention Warren’s neighbor Alice Bellows (who is also featured in “Agony Hill” and is shown to have connections to intelligence circles). “I also see her as a main character in the series. Hopefully I’ll get to write a lot of books in this series. You never know. But if I do, I definitely…there may be some books that focus more on her, and other books that focus more on Warren.” Taylor says the character of Bellows “is very much based on some women who I have read about and heard about.” She says one of them is Julia Child, one of many women who were married to foreign service officers and intelligence officers during World War Two. Many, she says, ended up working for the agency, in some ways, and often in very casual ways, where they would like take on little things. “But in some cases, they actually came to work for the OSS or the Company and then later the CIA.” Taylor says she was just kind of fascinated by the lives of these women. “That’s sort of where Alice came from. I imagined this woman who had grown up in this little town in Vermont and then had this kind of exotic life all around the world. Then her husband dies. And she might have had some suspicions about whether the stories she was told about him were correct. So she comes back to her hometown, but she still has all these connections, and some of those connections may not be willing to let her stay in retirement.”
Taylor adds that she just gave a Vermont humanities lecture on Vermont Cold War history the previous week. In talking about her research, Taylor told the audience that there were so many people who retired from the CIA to Vermont for exactly that reason. “It seemed like a place they could kind of live quietly and go ahead with their lives.” She says she uncovered a gathering of spies that happened in Land Grove around 1981 where a bunch of retired spies got together and had a conference. The goal, Taylor says, of this conference was to try to improve the reputation of spies “because they felt like spies were getting a bad rap or something.” Taylor continues that there was also story in the Boston Herald at that time about these people telling their stories, “and many of them lived in Vermont and had never spoken publicly about their intelligence work before. So there’s all this great stuff there.”
As far as her environment and what created her as a writer, Taylor relates that her father grew up in Plainfield, New Hampshire. He went to high school in Windsor “so I had these sort of Upper Valley roots through my father, but I actually grew up on Long Island.” Taylor explains that both her parents were public school teachers, and they lived on the North Shore of Long Island. “But every summer, we would rent out our house and come up here for two months, and kind of be near my dad’s parents. So I had very close ties to the area, but didn’t actually grow up in Vermont. It was very suburban where I grew up on the Island. In many ways, it was a nice place to grow up, but I always liked it better up here.”
Taylor says she would often would say to her parents at that age, “Why can’t we live up in New Hampshire or Vermont.” Taylor herself attended Middlebury College as an English literature major with a creative writing concentration. After college, she says, she was ready to try to get a job in publishing in New York City. “I had already done some work in that direction. But then I just had this feeling of like, ‘I’m not quite ready to really settle into into that.’” So instead, Taylor worked that summer and saved up some money to buy a plane ticket to Ireland. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I can get a job in a pub or something…I’ll travel around a little, and then I’ll go back and and set up a career in publishing. But I just fell in love with Ireland, and ended up staying for two and a half years and going to graduate school there.”
That experience in many ways founded the baseline for her D’arcy series but, as with many ideas, they take time to coalesce. “I think I do tend to kind of carry ideas around in my head for a while before I actually sit down to write them. I think there are a few reasons for that. One is that I find I have a lot of ideas, but they’re not [quite] enough to carry a whole book, if that makes sense. So walking around with these ideas in my head, there’s the ones that keep haunting me that I keep coming back to. Those are the ones that I think end up being worth writing about.”
Taylor says when she first started writing fiction, “I wrote things that you would probably describe more as literary fiction, short stories. And I tried to write some novels that I never finished.” She continues that she always loved reading mysteries and crime novels. “And I just saw it as a challenge. The first time I tried to write one, it was like ‘Could I put the pieces together to write a crime novel?’ And I tried, and I just had so much fun doing it.” What Taylor says she now realizes is “that what I love about crime fiction is that it takes characters and puts them under immense strain, and there’s a way in which putting them under immense strain kind of reveals character. It reveals essential things about them. It’s just a way I love to explore characters.”
In terms of the setting of the main farm(s) in “Agony Hill,” Taylor says that she was definitely inspired by places in in the Upper Valley. The fictional town in the book, she adds, is kind of a mash up of a lot of different places. There’s a little bit of Woodstock, a little bit of Hartland, a little bit of Windsor, a little bit of South Royalton and a little bit if Chester. “Probably, at some point I was driving up a remote road on a hill, and I kind of saw a farm and thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of like the one I’m picturing’ but it’s hard to even remember that now, you know?”
But building all these elements is a process, and every writer is different. ”So my process tends to be very quick. And by quick, I mean, sometimes it’s a few months — maybe four or five months or something — but l will have a quick and messy first draft.” Taylor finds that she really sprint through the first draft to get the story down. “That, for me, is the best way to proceed, because then I know the story I’m trying to tell. [From there] I can go back and revise and actually understand what I’m trying to do.”
She says when she has tried to write books where she did a few chapters, edited them and then tried to move forward, it didn’t really work. “The problem is I can’t really revise yet, because I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know who these characters are yet. I don’t know where they’re coming from. It’s all a process of discovery in that first draft.”
Within this structure though, there are certain points in that kind of writing where bridges have to be made to connect the story. “It’s interesting that you use the word ‘bridge,’ because that is kind of how I think about it. I always find the most difficult part of any book is that section before the end.” Taylor explains that there is the beginning/first half of a book “where you’re throwing a bunch of balls up in the air and trying to juggle them. But then the second half of the book is like, ‘How are you going to catch them all?’” She says it’s that “bridge” from that first half to the second half of the book “where you’re kind of resolving some threads, but complicating the actual [main] thread that will be resolved by the end of the book.” She adds that that is the most tricky part…”it’s where I sort of see all my mistakes in a way, and that often is when you will have to go back and revise and make some changes to the first half so that the second half will work. But it’s hard. That’s the part I always despair.”
It also comes back to how characters act and react that determine that trajectory of the story. “What’s fun about writing for me is discovering that. That’s when the characters become real to me. When I start to say, ‘Oh, actually, she wouldn’t do this. She would do this,’ that’s the really fun part.” Taylor says sometimes she has a very strong sense of character where she will be like, “Okay, this is who this character is. This is what they would do.’” Taylor adds though that sometimes she finds herself really surprised by what they actually do. “[So if we] expect [a character] to do this, but she does this instead, how will that affect the plot?” Taylor explains that this kind of question opens up opportunities for interesting characterization. “That, for me, is the balance between knowing the character really well and having their actions seem authentic to who they are, but then also surprising the reader…and [myself].” This is very true (without giving it away) to what Detective Warren does at the end of “Agony Hill.” Even Taylor says she was really surprised by what he did, but it felt right.
Writing to the male protagonist likely was also different than her last two series, which both had a female protagonist as their main characters. ”In my other two series, both have female protagonists. I did have to think about certain things here. And one of them was first person. I don’t know if I would ever write a first person book with a male protagonist, just because I’m not sure if I could do it authentically. I mean, never say never, but that’s interesting to think about.”
The thematic of family and loyalty are also key. Taylor herself has three children, the oldest two of which are boys, which she says gave her an interesting psychological perspective in “Agony Hill.” “So family was definitely something I was thinking a lot about, because there are all these different families in the book, and they all deal with each other in different ways.” She says Detective Warren specifically has a very complicated relationship with his family. He is estranged from them in many ways and is just sort of starting to talk to them again [because of a crucial character plot point in the book]. “As the series goes on, I hope to explore that even more. I think his relationship will evolve with his parents and of course, Sylvie is also sort of estranged from her family too because of her marriage. I kind of see her and Warren as parallel characters in a way who may, at some point, become more than parallel. But they are going on a similar journey.”
Taylor ends the discussion with the fact that one of the main reasons she wanted to write this new series is that she found inspiration everywhere around her at her farm in the Upper Valley which she shares with her husband Matt and her children. “I would just be outside taking care of our animals, and I would get a little detail that I could put into the book, and that just kept happening.” She says that while she loved writing her Irish books, “and I loved doing research trips to Ireland — it was just harder. It was like I had to store up all the details for the two weeks I was there and then try to access them once I got home. Whereas here, it’s just like everywhere.”
To find out more about Sarah and her various book series, visit sarahstewarttaylor.com.
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