The Survivors

The Survivors

By Jane Harper

Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences.

The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home.

Kieran's parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn.

When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away...

You all know I'm a big Jane Harper fan, and I was very excited about this one.  It felt a little different from her others, not so much because of the Tasmania setting, which does for the sea what her other books do for the outback and the jungle, but more because the main character wasn't isolated. 

As in several of her other books, the main character is coming back to town after being semi-ostracized for a youthful incident which led to someone's death.  Someone else dies and we begin to find out the connections between the two, usually alleviating some, if not all, of the guilt the main character felt at the start.  It was interesting to see here how the addition of the partner and baby made Kieran feel less likely to be killed, or have some sort of attack or something.  It just felt more secure, both in their attitude about what happened, but also in their future.  A baby can do that for you, I guess.  We see that explicitly in the book, too, when Kieran confronts the killer and the killer asks him how he overcame the guilt he had, and Kieran kind of goes, "I found something else to live for" referring to his baby and baby mama. 

I know that's kind of vague, but it really makes the book feel less of a "thriller" and more of a slow, easy mystery read.  There's very little concern that the main character will end up meeting a nefarious end.  And, like her other books, by the end the main character is absolved, not only of the recent death, but of their past guilt as well.  It's very explicit here, with repeated references to "The Survivors" a trio of monuments on the rocks which are meant to symbolize survivors of an earlier shipwreck.  They pop up repeatedly though, and the idea of survivor's guilt is heavy, not only with Kieran's youthful mistake in staying too late at the caves and requiring the ill-fated assistance, but also in the sense of those who were able to leave town and those who aren't, who are semi-captive to a fading locale, wholly dependent on tourists and dying out.  Kieran's father, who has dementia, and his mother, who is packing the house up in preparation for his father's departure, are also emblematic of the survivor's phenomenon, both wrapped up in the past in their own ways. 

Harper does a masterful job with the setting as usual.  Like her others, the location and elements are another character (gosh, how trite, but it's true) and the sea is a looming presence over everyone.  I would say that I still prefer The Dry  of all her books, but this was a good addition to her catalogue.  

The Dry

The Dry

By Jane Harper

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.

I hate prompts that require you to evaluate the book before you've read it!  I'm calling this one done, mostly because I could see this as a movie, and whether or not I think it should be a movie, well, I'm not going to ponder that one too deeply.

The conditions for reading it certainly helped me appreciate it: a warm summer day, out on a patio with a glass of rose sangria, waiting for a pizza to be ready for pick up.   You can read almost anything in those conditions and love it.

In this particular case, I very much enjoyed the beginning, felt like the middle was drawn out a bit too long, and was pretty satisfied with the ending.  Unlike the next book for review, I did not guess either answer to the book's two mysteries: What actually happened when Ellie disappeared and was found two days later drowned, and what actually happened twenty years later, when Luke's wife and child are found shot, and Luke dead with a shotgun next to him?

I liked the solution to the current day mystery, as it pretty much made sense and there were some clues, but the mystery of Ellie's disappearance felt like a side trip through irrelevantland. I understand that it added confusion  and tension to the main storyline, but every time we revisited the question, or dealt with Ellie's abusive father and redneck cousin, I got a little bit bored again.  It never rang quite true that the assumption that either Aaron or his father were involved because of a paper with their last name on it, despite their alibis, the ruling of suicide would be so bad as for them to literally pack up and never come back - I don't know, maybe I'm just not giving rural Australia enough credit for being backwards, paranoid, and superstitious.

I'm not going to lie, I was hoping that that the incredible drought (I mean, the novel is called The Dry, after all) was going to have some greater relevance to the story, like, they find new clues about the drowning because the river level is so unnaturally low.  You know how it is, nothing makes you unhappier as a reader than doing plot better than the author.  Not that it would be better, but certainly more dramatic!

Anyway, I enjoyed this enough I would read more by her (and my mother said she's got all of Harper's books, which is a strong recommendation in and of itself - she suggested I would enjoy The Lost Man as it's about a land dispute, which you know gets the old blood going, and sadly enough, she's probably right) and I did like the setting, which makes it at least a little off the well-trodden mystery path. 


04: A Book That Should Be Turned Into A Movie

Ten Second Reviews

Force of Nature

By Jane Harper

Five women hike into the wilderness on an executive camping retreat.  When only four return, investigator Aaron Falk is concerned that the disappearance of the fifth woman - Alice - may have something to do with her connection to him: she was about to hand over documents as a whistleblower which would have taken the company - and several people hiking with her - down.  This was my least favorite of the Jane Harper books, by a long shot.  As she's done in her other books, the narrative has two tracks: one is the timeline following the discovery of the disappearance, the other the events leading up to it.  Only at the end of both do we know what happened.  Here, the action is just super slow.  We know that Alice doesn't disappear until early Sunday morning, so following everybody from Thursday onward feels really sluggish - especially when we find out - SPOILERS! - that ultimately, the accident had nothing more to do with any ulterior motivations then that Alice was kind of a bitch and everybody was really on edge.  Plus, nothing about Beth's (or Bree's?) subsequent hiding of the body made any sense.  You thought your twin killed someone, so you hauled a corpse twenty feet off the path? That's more or less my two main complaints: very slow paced, and the ultimate solution to the mystery disappointed.  But, as ever, these are well written and Harper does a great sense of place.

The Rosie Result

By Graeme Simsion

This, like Force of Nature, was also the third of sorts, and not my favorite of the bunch.  I did like it, generally, on its own though, so in that respect it's not so similar.  It's the continuation of the The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect, which told more or less the meeting, and eventual coupling up, of the titular Rosie, and narrator Don, who is (by the end of the third, determinedly so) autistic.   The Rosie Result sort of tracks Don and Rosie's son's progress through a new school, and the question about whether he should be tested for autism/is autistic.  It's not as funny as the first installment, not as sad as the second.  It ends, as the others did, on a very hopeful note.  Don and Rosie's relationship is sturdy and I do think it suffers from the focus being on son Hudson, who is sort of a cypher to Don (and to readers) and not as much on Rosie, who is more down to earth and whose interactions with the more literal Don create the best moments in the series. Overall, nice for completists.

I suppose this is my "Australia" reading day - I hadn't even noticed until I started putting the labels on.  These could not be two more different pieces set in Australia - one is a social comedy about current views on health, disabilities, political correctness and parenting, set in and around the suburbs, the other is a murder/crime thriller set in the bush.