Exiles by Jane Harper: A review

 Exiles is an atmospheric mystery set in the wine country in the south of Australia. We find investigator Aaron Falk there as he attends the christening of the son of his friend, Greg Raco. Aaron has been asked to be his godfather, so he is there in a completely civilian and social capacity, not as a financial federal investigator.

However, there is a mystery here to be investigated. A year previously, a young mother had gone missing from the area, leaving her baby in a stroller in the parking lot at the annual wine festival. She has not been seen since and the mystery of her disappearance still troubles the community.

The mother had been married to Greg Raco's brother Charlie and voluntarily leaving her baby behind would have been completely anomalous behavior for her. The family asks their friend Aaron to look into the case further for them and try to find out what has happened to the missing mother.

This is a complicated mystery with multiple layers and it develops slowly, flowing between past and present timelines. Jane Harper takes great care in describing the personalities of the characters and the geography of the area in which the action takes place. Her descriptions of the vineyards and of the sunrises and sunsets there are quite vivid and memorable. I imagine it as a really beautiful place. 

Aaron Falk is an interesting character and in Exiles we see him torn between different possible career paths. Is there a career change in the offing for him? Guess we'll have to read the next installment to find out.

The Survivors by Jane Harper: A review

 

I had been looking forward to Jane Harper's next Australian mystery and so I pounced on this one as soon as it was published. It did not disappoint.

Harper's books are often set in some of the bleakest places Australia has to offer, such as the Outback. This one takes us to Tasmania, to a little town on the coast called Evelyn Bay. It is the town where Kieran Elliot grew up and where twelve years before he was involved in a tragedy that changed his and several other lives forever. 

Since then he had moved to Sydney and made a new life for himself with his girlfriend, Mia. They now have a young baby daughter. But Kieran and his family have been drawn back to Evelyn Bay and all the memories it holds by the needs of his parents. His father, Brian, is suffering from dementia, and his mother, Verity, is no longer able to care for him at home. He will have to go into a care home that is able to deal with his problems. Kieran is there to help with the transition.

When Kieran meets some of his old mates at the Surf & Turf, all the bad memories from twelve years ago are brought back. Back then he had been infatuated with Olivia and they would meet in a cave on the coast for hanky-panky. One day they met there oblivious to the fact that high tide was coming and although Olivia made it out, Kieran was trapped and in danger of being drowned. Olivia put out a distress call, and Kieran's brother and his brother's best friend who were out in their boat turned to try to rescue him. The boat foundered in the huge wave and both men were killed. 

Meanwhile, a 14-year-old girl named Gabby was also out there somewhere and was trapped by the wave. Her body was never found, but her backpack washed ashore, and she was presumed drowned. Kieran was finally able to scramble out and lived to blame himself for his brother's death. So did many others, including the young son of his brother's friend who died with him. 

The tragedy of the three deaths was almost more than the town could bear.  When Kieran returns to the town years later, the son of his brother's friend is now working at the Surf & Turf and his resentment of Kieran has not lessened. Working alongside him at the pub is a young woman named Bronte who also happens to be Olivia's roommate. The next day, Bronte's body is found along the shore. She had been murdered. Was her death somehow related to the deaths from years ago? She was new to the town and appeared to have no enemies. Who would have wanted to kill her?

Harper develops her narrative with care and at times I was flummoxed, wondering how does all of this connect? But in the end, it did and I appreciated her multi-layered characterizations and the realism with which she depicted a family and a town struggling with grief. The broken lives, especially that of Kieran, were described so honestly and genuinely that one could easily relate to the pain which they felt. When a visitor to the town provides an explanation that offers some reprieve to Kieran's pain, it also offers a sigh of relief for the reader. 

The ending, not to give away any spoilers, is emotional and utterly heartbreaking. But perhaps the town of Evelyn Bay as well as Kieran and his family can finally heal.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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

The Dry by Jane Harper: A review

I read Jane Harper's The Lost Man a year ago and promised myself that I would read more of her books. Finally, I'm fulfilling that promise.

The Dry was actually Harper's first published novel. It came out in 2016 and was a big hit, winning many awards in Australia, her home country and the place where her novels are set. The book introduced Federal Agent Aaron Falk who has just returned from Melbourne to the small town of Kiewarra where he grew up in order to attend a funeral. The town is full of secrets and now is reeling from the shock of three violent deaths which have been presumed to be murders and a suicide. The presumed murderer is Aaron's childhood friend, Luke Hadler, and the other two victims are his wife and young son. His thirteen-month-old daughter was left alive and unharmed in her crib. Luke's parents cannot believe that their son could have killed his family and they ask Aaron to look into it. Aaron normally investigates financial crimes. Investigating murder is not exactly his forte. But Luke's mother is the closest thing to a mother that he ever had - his own mother died when he was born - and he can't turn her down.

Aaron's return to the town is complicated by the reason why he left in the first place. He and his father had left the town twenty years earlier when Aaron was sixteen and a girlfriend of his had been found drowned in the nearby river. The death was ruled to be a suicide but there were those who didn't believe it and ugly rumors spread that Aaron was somehow responsible, but he was provided with an alibi for the time of the girl's death by his friend, Luke. The rumors were spread mostly by the girl's father. Aaron's father decided it was best if they moved elsewhere rather than try to fight small-town rumormongers. Twenty years later, the girl's father and her cousin still live there and they are still spreading rumors.

The town that Aaron returns to has been enduring the worst drought in Australian recorded history for the last two years. The countryside is a tinderbox. Many farmers are destroying their animals because they can't provide food and water for them. The town itself seems to be dying. Harper describes the parched and desiccated landscape so realistically that the reader can taste the dust and feel the heat of the unrelenting sun.

The other characters in the town are described in such vivid terms that we feel we have met them. Aaron himself is a bit of an enigma; he's smart, a loner with secrets, and he can find his way around financial records and that's where he starts his investigation. Luke's wife had handled the finances of the local school and so he reviews her records, hoping to find a clue that might explain what had happened. In the end, he finds a lot more than he bargained for. 

Harper's debut novel made for propulsive reading. It was a fast read because it was so hard to put down. There was a sinister sense of foreboding and I couldn't wait to see what would happen next. Best of all, she hid her perpetrator in plain sight and I didn't figure out whodunit until near the end. 

This didn't really have the feel of a first novel at all; it was a very accomplished effort. The strongest part of the novel for me was the writer's descriptions of the setting. I got thirsty just reading it. Moreover, her descriptions of the characters and the construction of the plot were just spot on. In fact, I have no criticism to make of the book. I don't see how it could have been made any better.

This was apparently the first book in a series that will be featuring Aaron Falk. I look forward to reading more and getting to know this charismatic and somewhat mysterious character better.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

The Lost Man by Jane Harper: A review

The Outback region of Australia is a hard land. People who choose to live there must also be hard in order to survive. That is the impression that one gets early on in Jane Harper's book, The Lost Man.

I had not read Harper, an award-winning Australian author, before, so I had no preconceptions and didn't really know what to expect from this book, but I had heard positive comments and decided to read it. Turns out that was a good choice.

The book at its heart is the portrait of a family and of the secrets the family keeps in order to appear "normal" to others. The family is the Brights, mother Liz and her three adult sons, Nathan, Cameron, and Bub. The husband and father of the family has been dead for ten years, killed in an automobile accident that also injured Liz.

Liz, Cameron and his wife Ilse and their two daughters, along with Bub live on the family property in that unforgiving Outback. The old family retainer, Harry, and two seasonal workers also live there. Nathan lives alone, following a divorce, on the adjoining property. He is the nearest neighbor and he is more than three hours away. His ex-wife and teenage son, Xander, live in Brisbane, but at the time we meet the family, it is almost Christmas and Xander is with his father for a visit for the holidays.

Nathan and Bub meet up near the line between the two properties at a place called the Stockman's Grave. It's a place where many years earlier a stockman had been lost in a dust storm and had died. He was buried where he died. Now there is another body on top of his grave. It is the middle son, Cameron; Cam to his family and friends.

There are no signs of violence on the body, other than the violence done by the sun and elements. The body was found in the only shade available in the area - that provided by the stockman's tombstone. Cam's vehicle is found at a great distance from his body, too far to walk in the heat without protection and with no water. It appears that he died of exposure and dehydration and when the autopsy is completed, that is the finding. Cam had been under stress and disturbed for some time prior to his death; the ruling is that he died by suicide.

The protagonist of the novel is Nathan and we see things through his eyes. Nathan who is an outcast in the community because of an unforgivable sin he committed years ago. There are things about his brother's death that don't seem right to him and that continue to niggle at his brain. He suspects that perhaps Cam had some help in dying. But who would want him dead? He was the golden son, apparently well-liked and respected by everyone.

Or was he?

Harper is absolutely masterful in building the tension in this thriller. We know that something doesn't seem quite right but it is hard to put our finger on it. Until slowly, methodically and with great subtlety the author begins to reveal the layers of secrets and lies that the family's lives have been built on. She creates a deeply atmospheric tale with characters and action and a plot that are absolutely believable. There are no superhuman heroics here; these are just ordinary, fallible humans who have made a ton of mistakes in their lives but they are still trying to find that elusive something.  Peace? Happiness? An ability to sleep at night without sleeping pills? Safety from harm? It is not impossible to believe in and identify with the Brights.

In addition to her skill in building the suspense in her novel, I was blown away by Harper's descriptions of the Outback. For example:

At night, when the sky felt even bigger, he could almost imagine it was a million years ago and he was walking on the bottom of the sea. A million years ago when a million natural events still needed to occur, one after the other, to form this land as it lay in front of him now. A place where rivers flooded without rain and seashells fossilised a thousand miles from water and men who left their cars found themselves walking to their deaths.

Maybe it was helped along by all my viewing of those Australian television shows on Acorn and Netflix, but I could envision the red land of the Outback very clearly, even though I've never been there. 

In spite of the bleakness of the place, there are those who love it and who understand it and its people on a visceral level. Nathan is one:

"Sometimes, the space almost seemed to call to Nathan. Like a faint heartbeat, insistent and persuasive... Life out here is hard. We all try to get through the best way we can. But trust me, there's not a single person here who isn't lying to themselves about something."

All those lies - or most of them anyway - are finally revealed in this character-driven tale. And in the end one could see that all the necessary clues to what happened to Cam were there in the narrative, hiding in plain sight so to speak, but I admit I didn't put them together until the writer revealed all in the last few pages. 

Well done, Jane Harper. My hat's off to you.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars