Sarah Stewart Taylor embodies the ideology that great writers “write what they know.” Her protagonist, Maggie D’arcy, is a former Long Island homicide detective who relocated to Ireland where she later joined the Dublin Garda. Taylor, who grew up on Long Island and now resides in Vermont, was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College in Dublin.

A STOLEN CHILD is the fourth installment in this series and may feature its heaviest police procedural work thus far. It is a pleasure to read as the story is so well told, and the characters are expertly depicted. The action starts immediately and does not let up until the very end.

"A STOLEN CHILD has everything a good mystery should have. This includes a steady build-up of clues and plot twists that keep readers moving along with the protagonists in a case that will involve a deep dive into the victim's personal and professional life."

Maggie is walking the beat with her partner, Jason Savage, when they are summoned to an apartment building where the landlord has discovered one of his tenants deceased. It just so happens that they had been on a domestic disturbance call to this same apartment a few days earlier. They found the young lady who lived there all alone watching an action movie at an extremely high volume.

Now they are looking at the corpse of that same woman. Jade Elliot was a model who had her 15 minutes of fame on a reality show about discovering Ireland’s Next Top Model. Her two-year-old daughter, Laurel, is nowhere to be found. They search the entire apartment, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, and call in the local coast guard to patrol the nearby waterway. All they find is a baby bag that belonged to Laurel.

Maggie is initially placed on the task force policing this case by her friend, Detective Inspector Roly Byrne, and is later joined by Detective Sergeant Padraig Fiero, with whom she worked on a previous case. They seek out Jade’s family and others who knew her.

Dylan Maguire, Laurel’s father, was not married to Jade yet paid of all their expenses. He was on a business trip in Lyon, France, at the time of the murder. Jade’s mother and sister, who live together outside of Dublin, are shocked by the news and have no idea why this happened. Fiona Creedon, who works at the modeling agency that discovered Jade, had advised Jade not to do the reality show. Maggie and her colleagues follow every lead they get; they even check out Nigel Canning, the local pedophile whom Dylan had indicated would often stare creepily at Laurel.

The investigation is getting nowhere as each piece of evidence or phone tip produces dead ends. One of Jade’s neighbors believes she was working a new job that she was not proud of. The team needs to know if Jade was mixed up in something illegal or immoral that could have put her in danger. Even when Maggie temporarily gets taken off the case and reassigned to her beat, she continues to keep her antennas up as she and Jason understand that the answers could lie within the street urchins they so often look at as just being a young nuisance.

A STOLEN CHILD has everything a good mystery should have. This includes a steady build-up of clues and plot twists that keep readers moving along with the protagonists in a case that will involve a deep dive into the victim's personal and professional life. You don’t have to be from the Emerald Isle to appreciate this novel, but the fact that Sarah Stewart Taylor has traded in the bucolic settings of her previous book, THE DROWNING SEA, for the inner city of Dublin shows just how well she knows her literary territory.