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Bethany is a classic New England town, with a village green, a cluster of businesses, an annual fair, and neighbors who know everything about each other. Frank Warren has arrived from Boston to serve the area as a state police detective, handling small crimes in the southern part of Vermont in 1965. Just as he begins to get his footing, he has to rush out to Agony Hill, to a farmstead outside the town. A man known as a misanthropic oddball, determined for philosophical reasons to raise his family on a farm despite his knowing little about farming, is found dead in his half-burned barn. It appears Hugh Weber was drunk and asleep on a cot, with the barn door locked from inside. Locals wonder if it might have been inspired by an earlier incident, when a farmer committed suicide to protest the new interstate highway being built across farmland, especially since Weber was equally opposed to the new road and frequently wrote letters to the local paper about it and other issues that made him indignant. It looks like a suicide.
Warren begins to examine the scene, wondering if there's another explanation. When he interviews Sylvie, the man's widow, he senses there's more going on than appears on the surface. His neighbor in town, an elderly woman who knows everything that's going on in Bethany, vouches for Sylvie, an uneducated and dreamy country woman who writes poetry when she's not having babies and running the farm. But the elderly neighbor, who traveled the world with her diplomat husband before returning to her home town, has secrets of her own – as does Warren, who suffered a tragedy and left Boston under a cloud.
The investigation is complicated by the arrival of the dead man's angry and violent brother, and by a second fire that may have been started by a figure several people have seen haunting the woods outside the town. As he digs into the case, Warren gets to know the community living in a Currier-and-Ives setting, wary of a future that will bring more summer residents from the city and disputes over the Vietnam war, approaching their quiet hamlet on the new interstate churning toward them.
Sarah Stewart Taylor has created a setting and cast that combine with a slow-simmering plot to create an immersive and engaging mystery. As a bonus, it comes with just enough loose ends and tempting possibilities to make AGONY HILL a solid foundation for a promising new series.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, August 2024
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