Torment Hill
By Sarah Stewart Taylor
Minotaur Books 2024
Sarah Stewart Taylor continues her new mystery in Torment Hillin 1965 Vermont, but if you don’t like historical novels (or, perhaps more pointedly, still don’t want to admit that the 1960s count), don’t worry. Not only has most of Vermont not changed much since 1965, Taylor doesn’t exactly put much emphasis on historical detail. People don’t have cell phones. Shockingly, some Houses do not yet have telephones. But apart from that, there are neither details nor, thank God, anachronisms that could disturb the present-conscious reader.
Instead, crime fiction lovers are immediately confronted with a whole host of familiar elements. There’s the fish out of water: Franklin Warren has just arrived in Bethany, Vermont, to accept a job offer from a friend: he’s becoming a detective with the state police, which is seeing increasing activity as crime moves north into Vermont’s villages and forests. And then there’s the baptism of fire: Warren has barely put on his shoes in Bethany when an emergency occurs, a fire on a farm called Agony Hill (another familiar element: exaggerated, meaningful place names). Help has rushed from all sides to save the barn and its hay supply, but inside the half-charred building, cops have found a body, the farm’s owner, Hugh Weber. And that introduces another familiar element: a locked door mystery. Weber was found dead on a cot and the barn was locked from the inside.
The fire leaves chaos in its wake, and Taylor writes everything at a strangely satisfying ambling pace that suits her rural setting. Readers get to know Warren little by little, and he gets to know the personalities and nature of his new surroundings just as little by little. The odd habits of Vermonters from a generation ago are sketched out superficially; the procedures of the local police are sketched out superficially; Warren’s own personality, dogged, not particularly bright, easily haunted by his own tragedies, is sketched out superficially. For a book centered on a burned corpse, Torment Hill is often a strangely light book.
It only goes into depth in a few places. Hugh Weber’s will leaves the farm to his wife Sylvie and only a copy of The Communist Manifesto to his brother Victor, adding, “Perhaps it will help him to recognize his bloodthirsty capitalist impulses and learn to curb them.” In doing so, he not only sets off a series of entertaining diversions (Victor does not take it well), but also reminds readers that they really would have liked to have known Hugh Weber.
Sylvie Weber is another of these deeper characters; she is by far the best-drawn character in the book, a pregnant widow, a stern but caring mother to her young children, a pragmatic farmer (when she has to shoot an injured ewe, she ratchets up the red herring by smugly telling Warren, “I don’t mind killing if it’s the kindest thing to do”). Taylor manages to be wonderfully sensitive in seeing the developing connections between Sylvie and Warren, especially when the Vermont landscape helps:
She wiped her hands on her dress, picked up a basket, and looked at him once more from behind the fence before she came through the gate and met him on the other side. The sun had sunk lower towards the horizon – in fact it seemed to be gathering speed, racing towards the hilltops and leaving the sky bloody behind it, the red and purple spreading across the expanse. They could not help themselves; they stood and watched her until she seemed to fade, and then without a word she led him back to the house.
“They had shared it,” Taylor writes, “the beauty of the sunset that would never be repeated, and he felt connected to her.”
Torment Hill itself is broadly similar to that scene, a pattern of clues, suspense, sub-crimes, and minor revelations, all punctuated by oddly random, memorable moments of quiet revelation. The film is convinced that it doesn’t need narrative tricks to keep the reader interested, and that belief isn’t misplaced.
Steve Donoghue is a founder of Open Letters Monthly. His book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and The Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor, and is books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.
