The Dry – Jane Harper
This book is everywhere – huge piles of it at Dymocks and you could buy it cheaply from Big W. It’s ubiquity put me off, but when it was selected by my book club I was prepared to give it a go.
Here is the blurb …
Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well…
When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.
And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds start bleeding into fresh ones. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret… A secret Falk thought long-buried… A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface…
What this book did brilliantly was create the feeling of heat
The late afternoon heat draped itself around him like a blanket.
and the belligerent men at the pub (I think they come standard with all small Australian towns).
This was a real page turner I wanted to know what happened to the Hadlers, but I also wanted to know what happened to Ellie. I did guess who did it, but not why.
This was a quick and enjoyable read, which I think would make a great movie (you can almost hear the background cricket noise – the insect not the game).