The Dry (Aaron Falk, #1) in One N' Done Book Corner

Oct 13, 2016 Meredith (Trying to catch up!) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

This beautifully written mystery transported me to Kiewarra, Australia, a small farming community that is suffering from a drought, and also from being mired in the past.

Aaron Falk, a federal financial police officer, reluctantly returns to Kiewarra to attend the funeral of his former best friend, Luke Hadler. It appears that Luke committed a murder suicide, killing his wife, Karen, and their six-year-old son, Billy, before taking his own life. The community is in shock and speculation abounds. ...more

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Jan 06, 2017 Monnie rated it it was amazing

If you have time to read no more than a handful of books this year, make sure this one of them. Yes, it's that good.

And to think I almost didn't read it. To get it, in fact, I broke one of my cardinal rules: Never trust gushing praise about a book when it comes from other authors. But in this instance, as a subscriber of email from David Baldacci, I got a message saying he'd read, and highly recommends, this one.

Just delete the message, the law-abiding side of my mind advised. Ah, countered my If you have time to read no more than a handful of books this year, make sure this one of them. Yes, it's that good.

And to think I almost didn't read it. To get it, in fact, I broke one of my cardinal rules: Never trust gushing praise about a book when it comes from other authors. But in this instance, as a subscriber of email from David Baldacci, I got a message saying he'd read, and highly recommends, this one.

Just delete the message, the law-abiding side of my mind advised. Ah, countered my more adventurous side, but it sounds good, and besides, Baldacci is one of my top five all-time favorite writers. What the heck, I finally decided - I'll go to NetGalley and see if an advance copy is available for review. If it is, I'll request it; if I'm approved, I'll take it as a sign from God.

Well, apparently, somebody up there loves me; it was on my Kindle the same day as my request. I'm joking about the love from on high, of course, but I'm not kidding when I say I absolutely loved the book. In fact, I breezed through it almost nonstop over a couple of days - eager to find out how it ends yet not wanting it to end. The story drew me in from the start, and the well-developed characters are so real it's hard to avoid loving (or in some instances, despising) every single one. The only thing that's hard to believe, in fact, is that this is a debut novel.

The setting is the small Australian town of Kiewarra, a couple of hours from Melbourne, where Federal Agent Aaron Falk plies his trade of solving financial cries. Aaron, who grew up in Kiewarra, has returned after 20 or so years to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Back then, a young female friend drowned under suspicious circumstances, and when Aaron became the prime suspect, Luke provided an ironclad alibi. But many local folks weren't willing to believe Luke's story, much less let Aaron off the hook; life turned so uncomfortable that Aaron's father insisted that he and his son pack up and leave, vowing never to return.

Now Aaron's back and Luke's dead, but it seems local folks have clung to their old, unpleasant beliefs. Worse, Luke now is on a hook of a different sort; by all accounts, he killed himself after taking the lives of his wife and son - leaving only their infant daughter alive. But Aaron isn't so sure that's what really happened; and when he gets his head together with a local detective, he learns the detective has doubts as well. Aaron's intent was to stay just a couple of days, wanting to make a relatively hasty retreat from the drought-destroyed land and bad memories. Urged on by Luke's distraught parents, who have taken in their surviving granddaughter, Aaron agrees to give it a week - after all, he's got some vacation time coming - just to help with what's being deemed an unofficial investigation.

The more he and the detective poke around, though, the more the suicide/murder theory unravels - and suddenly, the loose ends begin to reach back all those years ago to when Luke's faithful buddy stood up for him. In retrospect, did Aaron and Luke's friend kill herself, or was her death a result of something more sinister? Could the events of the past really be tied to the here-and-now murders of Luke's wife and son? If so, how? And who?

The story moves along quickly, with chapters interspersed with Aaron's "recollections" of what happened back then. Little by little, everything comes together, building up to an exciting, and for the most part surprising, ending. I was left wishing there was more to read, but also with the thought that Aaron would be a great character for a series (what say you, Ms. Harper)?

The moral to my own story? Some rules, it seems, are meant to be broken. Get this one - you won't be sorry.
...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Bill Kupersmith rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Aaron Falk, a police detective from Melbourne, returns to his boyhood home of drought-stricken Kiewarra for the funeral of the family of Luke Hadler, his boyhood mate. Apparently Luke had blown his head off with his shotgun after first killing his wife Karen & their son. Twenty years before, Aaron's father had taken his son and fled to the capital, pursued by Mal Deacon, the father of Luke's & Aaron's teenaged friend Ellie, who seemed to have drowned herself, leaving a note with the word 'Falk' Aaron Falk, a police detective from Melbourne, returns to his boyhood home of drought-stricken Kiewarra for the funeral of the family of Luke Hadler, his boyhood mate. Apparently Luke had blown his head off with his shotgun after first killing his wife Karen & their son. Twenty years before, Aaron's father had taken his son and fled to the capital, pursued by Mal Deacon, the father of Luke's & Aaron's teenaged friend Ellie, who seemed to have drowned herself, leaving a note with the word 'Falk' written on it. Later, in a book Karen had borrowed from the library, Falk finds a note with the word 'Grant' & his own phone number. Grant is the name of Mal's nephew, now Aaron's principal persecutor. Jane Harper's employing two ambiguous notes as clues brings out the strengths & the weaknesses of The Dry: telling economy of force, clues obscured with the simplest of misdirection, & ultimately a villainous plot too complicated to work in real life. The last need not be fatal artistically - I've read The Likeness four times - but it is that the more I learnt of the villain's motive the less persuaded I became. After finishing a five star, you want to read it again, sometimes immediately, sometimes after it's had time to settle. With The Dry, @ about 48 hours the fiction dissolved & the psychological improbabilities multiplied. As is common now, we're given bits & pieces of the backstory in italics. Especially striking was this gem. Nerving up to do the deed, we're told the villain was 'whispering up a silent feverish prayer' & as the victim approaches, the villain 'sent up a silent prayer of thanks.' I nearly fell out of bed. Which god was the villain praying to - Kali? Except for Thugs & members of ISIS, who ever prays before committing serial murder? I went back over the longest colloquy the detective has with the eventually found out villain, and discovered no suggestion @ all that the killer was the kind of person who might perpetrate such an atrocity. Leaving aside religious maniacs, we find such murders are either accidents such as a robbery that 'goes wrong' or committed by thrill-seeking sociopaths as in 'Funny Games'.

Many other psychological & spiritual shortcomings popped up on reflection. Even given that Mal is a senile nasty old idiot and Grant a mean drunk, their continued persecution of Aaron Falk is ultimately inexplicable & given the drought, filling his car with liquid shit a waste of water. Some of the clues seemed very arbitrary and based too much on coincidence - do all Australians use shotguns with the same bore to blow away bunnies? A more spiritually & emotionally satisfying book would have made the tragic Ellie the principal character. That we don't feel she haunts Aaron's memory betrays his lack of empathy & failure to love. True, 17 year-old boys don't do relationships - a good reason not to use their POVs if you're seeking emotional depth. (A fault shared by J. D. Salinger & John Green BTW.)

Settings & descriptive passages, tho', are excellent. The Dry reminded me constantly of Sharon Bolton's Little Black Lies. Both movingly depict small communities under great stress & characters dealing with grief & unresolved problems from their pasts. In both the very landscape becomes a principal actor. As I'm a sailor not a farmer the Falkland Islands resonated better for me than the outback of the State of Victoria, tho' I grew up in Texas & live in Iowa so I have some notion of what a drought & a farm crisis feel like, (I'd like to have listened the the audio for the voices - Australians basically strike me like Texans who talk like Bostonians - wearers of big hats who pronounce 'khaki' like what you use to start your 'cah'! (I once saw the word spelled that way on a panel beater's shop in Melbourne.) Perhaps Jane Harper should switch to nonfiction - I could imagine her in the same class as John McPhee. But as a fiction writer she doesn't come near authors such as Tana French or Sharon Bolton, whose characters you love & care for & who raise moral & spiritual issues of complexity & poignancy. But The Dry ranks as a solid four-star, an excellent one time read. Most four-stars I find fast one-time reads; this one is slower & such a good read as to be worth the effort - once. Whilst I've heard future exploits are envisioned for Aaron Falk; I fear I shall be otherwise engaged. ...more

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May 20, 2019 La Tonya Jordan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: good-read

In Kiewarra Australia, there is a drought that has prolonged for over two years, killing crops, animals, and the spirit of the people in Kiewarra. Many farms and businesess have folded. Those who are holding on keep thinking the drought must end eventually. For Luke Hadler the stress appeared to be too much at the thought of losing his farm, he kills his wife (Karen), son (Billy), and himself. The town Luke grew up in is devasted. This is where the past meets the present. Ellie Deacon commited s ...more

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Nov 14, 2018 Vanessa rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery, bookpage, novelist

Sure, Australia has plenty of venomous animals on land and sea (not to mention invasive bunnies, which also figure into this story), but it's your neighbors you have to worry about in this novel—the first in a series—about a murder investigation in rural Victoria province.

There's also the drought (hence the title.) Or maybe it's the overwhelming isolation of the landscape:

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing v Sure, Australia has plenty of venomous animals on land and sea (not to mention invasive bunnies, which also figure into this story), but it's your neighbors you have to worry about in this novel—the first in a series—about a murder investigation in rural Victoria province.

There's also the drought (hence the title.) Or maybe it's the overwhelming isolation of the landscape:

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and not see another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.

Soon they'd discover that their veggies didn't grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.....Arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing: I didn't know it was like this.

If you are picking up Tana French vibes, Jane Harper has been frequently compared to her. And there are appealing similarities: the mood of the story, the set-up (a police detective gets embroiled in a case that has personal connections which lead to a potential professional crisis), the sticky fingers of the past.

Aaron Falk has not returned to his (fictional) hometown of Kiewarra in the rural country east of Melbourne since he and his father were more or less run out of town when he was a teenager after they were interviewed by police following the suspicious death of one of Aaron's friends, a girl he had long harbored a crush on. Years later, Aaron is forced to return for the funeral of his childhood friend Luke, who has inexplicably killed his family and himself. Luke's parents don't believe it though, and while Falk specializes in financial crimes, they ask him to investigate. Falk finds himself unable to turn them down.

The premise and writing style were immediately engaging. Two suspicious suicides in one small town in 20 years, both with many of the same people involved. Did Luke really kill his family? Why? Did Ellie pull a Virginia Woolf and drown herself in the river years ago? And why did Luke insist he and Aaron fabricate an alibi that they were together when it happened? Are these events connected somehow? Even Luke's grieving father has his suspicions.

I really enjoyed this (not quite as much as Tana French, but that is a tall order) and inhaled the book in two days. It's fitting Harper gets compared to French, because the reactions to this seem a bit mixed. I feel confident though that if you enjoy mystery, you should give it a try. Occasionally I could see where Harper was going--red herrings, too obvious suspects that may or may not circle back around to become relevant--and I guessed a few things, but that didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the conclusion. I ordered the second book from the library when I was around halfway through this one, already eager to keep going. ...more

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Oct 21, 2017 Audrey rated it liked it

Shelves: reader-s-choice, mystery-action-thriller, readers-choice-winners, 2017-books

I feel like I’m missing something when it comes to mysteries. I feel like nothing happens until the very end. If you’re a real mystery fan, you’ll probably enjoy this one.

The story starts off with a murder-suicide, but Aaron Falk, our main hero, notices a few things that are just a little off and starts looking deeper into the case. For about three-fourths of the book, he’s following very flimsy clues, grasping at straws, until he finally gets the piece of information he needs to figure everythi ...more

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Jun 15, 2018 Marc rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

Wow! This was a great read. I had my suspicions and the author took me in so many different directions and yet, at the end, I was surprised by it. This is an excellent debut novel and I'm looking forward to reading the next Aaron Falk novel. ...more

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Mar 27, 2018 Jen rated it really liked it

This was great! I can't wait to read the next one!! ...more

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Nov 11, 2020 Diann rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery, book-club-reads, zz-owned-on-kindle, aussie-nz-south-pacific-hawaii

Very well done mystery set in the drought-laden Australian outback. Good development of character and of suspense, as well as potential motivations for murder. We'll be discussing this at next week's book club meeting. ...more

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