Anyone who’s lived in a small community will recognise the types of people and behaviours presented here. The community, which revolves around the school and the pub, is riven by poverty and personal tensions, and rumour and gossip abound. Harper’s portrayal of small town life played out against a backdrop of ongoing severe drought is an authentic and claustrophobic one. Are either of them reliable? And just because Falk’s a cop, should we regard him as trustworthy? Through the clever use of flashbacks Harper does a good job of revealing small nuggets of information that force the reader to constantly reassess their opinion, not just of Falk but of Hadler as well.
Running in tandem with this storyline is a darker one involving Falk’s own past, which fleshes out why he fled town for the city, dragging his father in tow, two decades earlier. Working under the radar with the newly appointed local sergeant, Greg Raco, the pair’s unofficial investigation reveals some disturbing facts that suggest Luke may have not pulled the trigger on his wife and child after all. When he returns for the funeral, Mrs Hadler asks him to look into the case for her - even if he isn’t “that sort of police officer”. Luke was his best friend at high school and the pair kept in touch. The police in Clyde, the nearest big town with a fully staffed cop shop, think otherwise and have closed the case.Įnter Aaron Falk, a federal police officer specialising in white-collar crime, who grew up in the town but left under a cloud when he was 16. Luke Hadler’s mother doesn’t believe her son was capable of killing himself, nor his loved ones, and suspects that he may have been murdered by a debt collector. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, the farm, like all others in the area, had been struggling financially. The only survivor - and witness - is a baby.īut the case isn’t clear-cut. The book, which is set in the fictional country town of Kiewarra in rural Australia - about 500km north-west of Melbourne - is the first by Harper, a British-born journalist now based in Melbourne (she writes for the tabloid newspaper Herald-Sun), and the story itself could have been lifted from the headlines: a murder-suicide of a man, his wife and young son, found shot dead in a farmhouse. But that’s what happened when I opened Jane Harper’s The Dry, a book I had not heard anything about and had only stumbled upon by accident when I was looking for Australian reads to download onto my Kindle before heading to Greece for a week. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a crime novel and been completely transfixed from the first page. Fiction – Kindle edition Little, Brown Book Group 352 pages 2016.
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