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