A DISTANT GRAVE

A second deep-laid mystery for Long Island homicide Detective Lt. Maggie D’arcy pivots on the movements and motives of a man who crossed the Atlantic to get murdered.

The man shot in Bay Shore Manor Park, the man whose back is covered with gruesomely distinctive scars, is identified as international aid worker Gabriel Treacy, an Irish national whose boss, Global Humanity CEO Gillian Gleeson, calls him a saint. Suffolk County DA John J. Cooney Jr. is certain that it’s a gang killing, especially when the bullet that killed Treacy turns out to have been fired by the same gun that killed presumed MS-13 victim Juan Bollina last year, and he can’t imagine why Maggie and her partner, Detective Dave Milich, haven’t made an arrest. But Maggie, who thinks the answer lies across the sea, packs up her teenage daughter, Lilly, who’s still traumatized by the suicide of Maggie’s ex-husband, and takes her on a working vacation in Ireland, where she hopes to spend some serious time with her sweetie, Conor Kearney. Their idyll, punctuated by the news that Treacy’s family solicitor, Noel Thomason, has been killed in an apparent burglary, is cut short by Cooney’s summons demanding her return to Long Island. It’s there that Maggie will finally connect the dots between the two darkest episodes of Treacy’s life: his kidnapping and torture in Afghanistan and his search for the brother his unmarried mother gave up years before Treacy was born.

Taylor pulls out all the stops—subplots, threats, red herrings, warning bells—to keep the pot boiling till the end.