Book Review: The Dry, by Jane Harper

This is a very good read. I read it in one sitting - it truly is one of those books that is impossible to put down!

The book opens with Aaron Falk, a Melbourne police officer, returning to his hometown in the Australian outback after a twenty year absence, to attend the funeral of his childhood best friend Luke Hadler. Luke, his wife and their young son were all found shot dead and it looks as if the only person who could have been responsible is Luke himself. The town is in the grip of a fierce drought and tensions are running high throughout the community as farms and local businesses are beginning to fail. At the request of Luke's parents Aaron begins to dig around, looking into the deaths, but he is keeping secrets of his own from twenty years before - secrets that he thought only he and Luke shared. The more time he spends in the town, the more it becomes apparent that these long buried secrets are threatening to resurface. Do they have any bearing on what happened to the Hadlers? 

The setting is what sets this apart from other thrillers and Jane Harper does a fantastic job of bringing the Australian outback to life and evoking the never ending heat and isolation. She shows how this heat and isolation can lead to incredible tension and frustration...which is a great for a thriller like this - just about every character in the book is a potential suspect as the drought makes people behave in ever more threatening and bizarre ways! Small town life with all it's gossip and small mindedness, coupled with the worries of life lived at the mercy of the climate make for high emotions and unusual behaviour all round. 

The plot is fast paced and full of twists and turns, several times Harper managed to lead me completely up the wrong path, having me suspect various people in turn and for a chapter or so I would be certain of that person's guilt before a plot twist led me off in another direction. Masterful stuff. So often I feel let down by the ending of novels like this, feeling either that the motive was utterly ridiculous or the character responsible for the crime was one that had hardly been mentioned in the book before and was just introduced almost incidentally to be the culprit, but this was not the case with The Dry. The ending was entirely plausible and a surprise right up until Falk himself begins to work it out.

An unusual and well written thriller that I would highly recommend.