The Dry / Jane Harper

 

3 out of 5 stars

Not bad, but not really what I'm looking for these days. Oh, it kept me reading, but like many modern mysteries and thrillers, there were so many details that I wanted to quibble with.

I haven't read many books set in Australia and this one is positioned in a drought-stricken, financially shaky rural area. I've spent limited time in Australia and almost all of it in urban areas. That would be like trying to understand rural Canada by spending time in Vancouver or Toronto. However, I grew up in small town & rural Canada and I think it has some similarities. Prejudices are pronounced and memories are long. But I'm not sure that anyone could hold a grudge as long as this community seemingly has.

Harper uses Aaron Falk's childhood memories of the Kiewarra area as a way of intertwining a historical mysterious death of a young woman with a current tragedy. In the present, Falk's childhood friend has apparently killed his wife, one of his kids, and himself. Falk was a suspect in the former death and he and his father left the community to avoid the vindictiveness of their neighbours. It was a useful conceit for the purposes of the plot, but I thought abandoning their farm was a bit of an extreme action. And is policing and investigation in Australia really so ineffective and uncaring?

The historical mystery seemed tissue paper thin to me. When someone dies, the first and strongest suspects are family members. It also seemed absolutely obvious that the young woman was a domestic abuse victim, making her family the primary suspects, not her high school friend. The modern mystery seems not so mysterious, but Falk has questions. He is a white collar crime investigator, not a homicide specialist, so what is he doing teaming up with the local copper? Unofficially investigating a closed case? And they are the talk of the community, but no one has clued in the larger police force who were the original investigators?

I often have these struggles with the believability of thrillers. That's on me, I'm not a fan of the genre. But I've got to try one now and then to see if it's still so. Harper is a decent writer, at least, making this a less painful experience than it might have been.