Force of Nature by Jane Harper: A review

This is Jane Harper's second book featuring Australian Federal Police financial investigator Aaron Falk. In the first one, her debut novel The Dry, she took us to the drought-ridden Australian outback and made us feel the parched, desiccated landscape. I had to keep my water bottle by my side while reading it. The descriptions were that evocative. In this follow-up, we visit the cold, wet, windy, and wild Giralang mountain range north of Melbourne, and Harper makes us shiver and reach for a sweater while reading. The woman really does excel at mood and atmosphere setting.

The story begins as a weekend corporate teambuilding retreat in the mountains. Selected employees of the BaileyTennants financial firm are sent to the Giralang mountain range for the retreat. There will be two groups, one composed entirely of women and the other of men, and they will follow separate courses set up by the company that devises the exercises and will meet up again at the end of the weekend. The women's group comprises five mostly reluctant women. The rules of the weekend are that all phones and personal communication devices must be left behind; they would be useless in the mountains anyway. But one woman, Alice Russell, manages to conceal her phone and take it with her.

From the beginning, the group is tense and disputative and, as we gradually learn, each member is beset by her own personal anxieties and worries. This does not bode well for building a team.

At the end of the weekend, the men's group emerges from the mountains, but where are the women? The original feeling of annoyance with the women quickly turns to unease and apprehension as they fail to appear. Eventually, four of the women do trail out of the mountains, one with snakebite and others with various injuries, but where is the fifth woman? Where is Alice Russell?

This is a concerning question for Aaron Falk and his new partner, Carmen Cooper because they had been investigating irregularities in the financial dealings of BaileyTennants and Alice Russell had been their informant. She had been set to provide the documents to back up the information she had provided, and now she's missing. Does her disappearance have anything to do with her secret cooperation with investigators?

Falk and Cooper join the massive search party combing the wild bushlands looking for Alice. As time goes by, hope for finding her alive in the cold, rain, and isolation of the mountains diminishes. When her body is finally found with a head wound the apparent cause of her death, the search turns to finding her killer. Falk and Cooper are also hoping to turn up those documents she had promised.

Jane Harper continues to impress me with her ability to set a scene and an atmosphere with no extraneous wordiness. Her writing might well be described as spare; it seems that every word has a purpose and nothing is wasted. She brilliantly describes her characters by sketching their family dynamics, their histories, and secrets. We come to feel that we have met these people, we know them. The psychological tensions built into their complicated relationships become the heart of the story and it was only near the end that I was beginning to get a glimmer of the truth of the matter.

Aaron Falk is an appealing character. I wonder if more Harper novels featuring him might be forthcoming.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars