Agony Hill by Sarah Stewart Taylor

 

My thoughts

This was a quick read for me. I enjoyed the book very much. It had a lot of great things. The descriptions of the area were so realistic. They make you feel like you are there. Walking in the woods or up a mountain. Like you can smell the smoke after the fires. Feel the way the community acted towards people who didn't have as much as them. Not a good trait but a realistic one.

The setting is Bethany, Vermont. The time frame is 1965. There is a death. A couple of fires. A few suspects. A possible suicide. 

When this book starts off I thought something awful had happened to the woman in the Prologue. Later you find out exactly what did happen. You get to know her pretty well. You'll be invested in her life. The lives of her children and the life and death of her husband who was not such a good man. In many ways he was very much disliked in the community. But his wife and children could not help the things he did. They could not help being poor. 

You get to know the new man in town. An investigator by the name of Franklin Warren, or Frankie to some. He was getting settled in when he was called to the scene of a fire with a body. The barn had partially burned and there was the remains of a person. Now it's his job to figure out exactly what happened and why. It could be a suicide but could also be murder.

There are several people in this book that you meet. Some likable and some not so much. Like a lot of stories there are secondary characters that you hope grow and become more important as the story is told. They are well written in this book and I look forward to meeting them again in the next Franklin Warren installment. Also a few things that will be cleared up in the next book. Nothing huge but just a few things that I want to know more about and expect will come up in the second book.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was not one that just wowed me but it was still good. It kept me turning the pages. It's a book that makes you feel like you are there. Like you know some of these people. It's a kind of feel good and kind of who did it. I figured out who did it and it did not in any way take away from the story. 

Thank you #NetGalley and #StMartinsPress for this ARC. This is my honest opinion of this book.

4.5 stars. 

About

Set in rural Vermont in the volatile 1960s, Agony Hill is the first novel in a new historical series full of vivid New England atmosphere and the deeply drawn characters that are Sarah Stewart Taylor's trademark.

In the hot summer of 1965, Bostonian Franklin Warren arrives in Bethany, Vermont, to take a position as a detective with the state police. Warren's new home is on the verge of monumental change; the interstates under construction will bring new people, new opportunities, and new problems to Vermont, and the Cold War and protests against the war in Vietnam have finally reached the dirt roads and rolling pastures of Bethany.

Warren has barely unpacked when he's called up to a remote farm on Agony Hill. Former New Yorker and Back-to-the-Lander Hugh Weber seems to have set fire to his barn and himself, with the door barred from the inside, but things aren’t adding up for Warren. The people of Bethany—from Weber’s enigmatic wife to Warren's neighbor, widow and amateur detective Alice Bellows — clearly have secrets they’d like to keep, but Warren can’t tell if the truth about Weber’s death is one of them. As he gets to know his new home and grapples with the tragedy that brought him there, Warren is drawn to the people and traditions of small town Vermont, even as he finds darkness amidst the beauty.