The Dry

A Novel

Jane Harper

When we asked our audience about books in Australia, half of them recommended the title of this book before we finished the word ‘Australia.’ They were correct. This is a gripping crime novel with a very strong sense of place.

It’s set in rural Victoria, in Kiewarra, a small town in the grip of a once-in-a-century drought. We meet Aaron Falk, on the long road back to his hometown — the first time he’s returned in twenty years. He’s back for a funeral, and he is counting the hours until his departure.

He’s a federal police officer in Melbourne now; financial crimes. Thirty-six years old, pale and blonde. He wears a wide-brimmed canvas hat with his black funeral suit because the alternative is melanoma. Falk left Kiewarra under a dark cloud at the age of sixteen. That cloud? Another death: a girl named Ellie Deacon, drowned in the river. There were rumors back then. There are rumors now.

Falk wouldn’t be here at all were it not for his friend Luke Hadler. A farmer, local born and bred, Luke has, by all reports, killed his wife and his six-year-old son with a shotgun, and then turned it on himself. Their baby daughter Charlotte is eighteen months old and somehow survived. The town has spent the last week trying to put together a story everybody can live with: The drought broke him. The pressure broke him. It happens.

But Falk doesn’t believe this constructed narrative. And he desperately does not want to be there. His plan to stay for only eighteen hours evaporates when Luke’s grieving father slips him a note: You lied. Luke lied. Be at the funeral.

What unfolds is a double mystery: the present-day Hadler killings and the twenty-year-old Ellie Deacon case, both coming to a boil at the same time. And the thing that makes The Dry work is that the place itself is doing as much of the storytelling as the plot.

The drought is an antagonist, and Kiewarra is a town in desperate decline. The main street is mostly boarded-up shopfronts. The people who are left are ‘walking around like zombies. Not sure what to do, what to say. Watching each other. Trying to work out who’ll be next to snap.’

Jane Harper is a master of generating the heat and discomfort of the environment. You can feel the scorch of the late-afternoon sun. The car-door handle that sears your hand. The fly that lands on a character’s lip in the middle of a serious conversation about murder. The collective claustrophobia of mourners spilling out of a community center because the air conditioner can’t keep up. You understand why these people are at the end of their rope.

She also brilliantly handles Falk. He is, by his own account, an albino-pale thirty-six-year-old with skin ‘the blue hue of skimmed milk’ who has felt his whole life ‘that the Australian sun was trying to tell him something.’ He is not your standard detective. He is somebody who, every time he checks his watch, is calculating exactly how long he has left before he can get out of town. He checks his watch a lot. He hates his hometown. A good part of his hometown hated him first.

If you want a crime novel where you can feel the heat coming off the page — and a very strong sense of rural Australia — this book is a good place to start.

Bonus Aussie Noir fun: Aaron Falk turns up in two more novels: Force of Nature and Exiles, which Harper has said is his final adventure.

Even those who didn’t darken the door of the church from one Christmas to the next could tell there would be more mourners than seats. A bottleneck of black and grey was already forming at the entrance as Aaron Falk drove up, trailing a cloud of dust and cracked leaves.

Neighbours, determined but trying not to appear so, jostled each other for the advantage as the scrum trickled through the doors. Across the road the media circled.

Falk parked his sedan next to a ute that had also seen better days and killed the engine. The air conditioner rattled into silence and the interior began to warm immediately. He allowed himself a moment to scan the crowd, although he didn’t really have time. He’d dragged his heels the whole way from Melbourne, blowing out the five-hour drive to more than six. Satisfied no-one looked familiar, he stepped out of the car. — Jane Harper

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