A review by mepresley
The Mountains Wild: A Mystery by Sarah Stewart Taylor

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I enjoyed this read, which reminded me very much of Tana French, not just in terms of the Irish setting, but in terms of the fact that the mystery is embedded in an interior-focused psychological portrait of the detective figure, in this case Maggie D'arcy.

The novel presents us with parallel timelines of Maggie's two trips from the US to Ireland, where her cousin, Erin, disappeared. Maggie's first trip, two weeks after the last sighting of Erin, is in 1993; her second trip is in 2016, after the disappearance of another woman reignites the cold case of Erin's disappearance.

We see the detectives follow similar trajectories in both timelines, as the 2016 disappearance has them retracing their steps and interviewing the same witnesses/ suspects. I think that this technique got a little redundant after a while. Though new bits of information kept popping up, there was also a lot of hearing the same information from the same people. 

There were some very solid red herrings, such as

Erin's one-night stand with the investment banker's son and the groundskeeper at the golf course where one of the earlier victims worked

. The doubt cast on

Maggie's love interest, Conor, felt a little cheap.

I really liked the way that Maggie ended up solving the case.

I found it hard to believe that everyone had missed a receipt from 1993 that indicated Erin had returned to Dublin two days after she disappeared. This turned out to be a clue that we were given the key to in the earliest pages of the novel; Maggie's daughter, Lilly, had been going through all the boxes in the basement and had mixed up Maggie's boxes, including her files on Erin, with her ex-husband, Brian's boxes. It was Brian who came to Dublin and changed money two days after Erin disappeared, and it was Brian who killed Erin to prevent her from coming forward about Erin's gang-rape in which his brother participated.

 

I don't think that we had enough pieces of the puzzle to figure out the identity of the serial killer, and it seems unlikely that

the investigators would not have thought to look into cars being serviced by Niall's garage AND that the cabin in the woods wouldn't have been discovered years before, given the epicenter of the crimes.