Five mystery novels about characters searching for relatives

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. She grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries.

Taylor's new novel is The Mountains Wild.

[See--The Page 69 Test: The Mountains Wild.]

At CrimeReads she tagged a few "favorite mysteries about characters searching for relatives—and themselves." One title on the list:

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

I loved Wilkinson’s debut novel, about a black woman blazing trails—and becoming disillusioned—in the FBI and the CIA during the Cold War. Marie Mitchell, the brilliant and reserved daughter of a Martinican mother and an American father, is younger sister to the assured and brave Helene. Growing up without their mother, Helene and Marie are both spies of a sort. There’s something inscrutable about Helene and yet, she is fiercely protective of Marie, and as Marie makes her own way in the shadowy intersection of American law enforcement and intelligence, Helene’s example is never far away.

The novel is a clever spy thriller set in post-independence Burkina Faso, a murder mystery, and a love story, but it’s also about Marie’s search for the truth about Helene and her life and death. What she finds will have far-reaching consequences, for Marie and for her young sons. I found the sister pair at the heart of American Spy one of the most thought -provoking things about a truly wonderful and provocative novel.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue