Sarah Stewart Taylor Books in Order

If you want Irish crime with family stakes: The Mountains Wild → A Distant Grave → The Drowning Sea → A Stolen Child
If you like academic mysteries and old secrets: O' Artful Death → Mansions of the Dead → Judgment of the Grave → Still as Death
If you want small-town Vermont in a historical mood: Mud Season → Agony Hill → Hunter's Heart Ridge
If you want a younger nonfiction pick: Amelia Earhart

Sarah Stewart Taylor grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, in a family of public school teachers. Summers pulled her toward New England, and later Middlebury College did too. She studied English literature there, with a creative writing concentration, and that mix of close reading and making things up seems to have stayed with her.

Ireland changed the map.

After college, Taylor spent several years in Dublin and went on to graduate study in Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin. She lived there in the mid-1990s, and the place clearly sank in deep. Long before she wrote the Maggie D'arcy novels, she was learning the rhythms of the city, the pull of the countryside, and the complicated feelings that can come with ancestry, distance, and belonging.

Before fiction became the main job, Taylor worked as a journalist and a teacher. Her reporting appeared in major newspapers, and that training shows. Her novels notice the telling detail, the thing on the kitchen table, the odd sentence someone avoids finishing, the weather moving in at the wrong moment. Even when she is writing about murder, she is just as interested in how people live as in how they die.

Then came O' Artful Death.

That debut introduced Sweeney St. George, a young art historian with a specialty in gravestone and funerary art. It was an unusual setup, and a memorable one. The book was nominated for an Agatha Award for best first novel, and the series that followed, including Mansions of the Dead, Judgment of the Grave, and Still as Death, let Taylor dig further into some of her favorite territory, New England settings, old scandals, museum and cemetery history, and the way the past keeps pressing on the present.

With The Mountains Wild, she shifted into a different register. The book introduces Maggie D'arcy, a Long Island homicide detective pulled back to Ireland by the decades-old disappearance of her cousin Erin. A Distant Grave, The Drowning Sea, and A Stolen Child continue Maggie's story, moving between Long Island and Ireland and mixing police work with family strain, grief, and the question of where home really is. Readers who connect with Taylor's books often seem to like the same things, strong sense of place, emotional stakes that feel earned, and investigators who are capable without ever seeming superhuman.

She also stepped outside adult crime fiction with Amelia Earhart, a graphic biography created with illustrator Ben Towle. The book looks at Earhart's 1928 Atlantic crossing, but it also fits neatly with Taylor's broader interests. It is about risk, motion, ambition, and a woman trying to do something that would widen the path for others.

Then she came back to Vermont.

Her more recent books, Agony Hill and Hunter's Heart Ridge, open a historical mystery series set in the fictional town of Bethany in 1965. Franklin Warren, a state police detective newly arrived from Boston, shares the stage with Alice Bellows, a sharp local widow with her own secrets. These books bring in small-town Vermont, the new interstate, Cold War unease, and the sense that big national changes are finally reaching dirt roads and back kitchens.

Taylor's work has been nominated for awards including the Dashiell Hammett Prize and the MWA Sue Grafton Memorial Award, but the plainest way to describe her appeal is simpler than that. She writes mysteries for readers who like people as much as plot. The crimes matter, but so do the families, the landscapes, the meals, and the histories people are carrying around whether they admit it or not.

Now she lives in Hartland, Vermont, with her husband, Matt Dunne, and their three children. Home includes a farm, sheep, and blueberries. That mix, literary life on one hand, muddy boots on the other, feels right for a writer whose books are so rooted in place. She writes about landscapes people can smell and roads they can picture, and she tends to give even small-town mysteries a wide emotional horizon.