Blog Tour: The Dry

The Dry by Jane Harper ★★★★☆

Published: 12th January 2017

Pages: 352

Genre: Mystery/Crime

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher Little Brown. All opinions are honest and my own.

I just can’t understand how someone like him could do something like that.

Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn’t rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone things Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty.

Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke’s death threatens to unearth. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past and why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend’s crime.
– Official Synopsis

It is often difficult to balance a current crime with a secret from the past in a novel. But Jane Harper manages it wonderfully in The Dry. Flashbacks to the Aaron Falk’s past are scattered through the novel, and work brilliantly to add depth to the story without detracting from the death out the Hadler family at the centre of the plotline.

I was hooked into the mystery throughout the novel, constantly trying to figure out what had really happened. Multiple times I was sure I had the answer, but as with any good crime novel I was of course wrong. And while I didn’t guess the truth, it also felt right as a conclusion.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It was a very different setting to my usual crime reads, but I definitely recommend lovers of mysteries checking it out!

Check out the other bloggers on today’s stop of the blog tour

The Dry is Jane Harper’s debut novel and will be released 12th January 2017. The first draft won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in Australia, and the film rights have already been sold to Pacific Standard (producers of Gone Girl).

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