A clear, engaging mystery, with lots of local color. One I would have cheerfully read in one sitting. Almost did but, y'know ... people ... real life ... what can you do?
SECOND THOUGHTS, having reread this for a book group.
Harper is a keeper, that's for sure. I've now read three of her novels, and re-read one, and I'd say that her grade overall is a very, very solid B+ -- two A-, and one very readable B-. I felt the same headlong rush to read on, and turn the pages, and figure out what the heck happened as I did the first time. Felt the same sense of place, and given the terrible news from Australia in recent weeks, the same dreadful sense of good, hard-working people living on the edge of a catastrophe -- the murder of the Hadler family seems like an apt metaphor for what can happen in tiny increments, or one terrible rush of fire, to any family living in an Outback town like Kiewarra.
If I have dropped my rating down one star, from the breathless 5-* I gave it on first reading, it's because I think some of the cracks show. The locals are drawn as just a little too sheep-like, too willing to accept first, the guilt of Aaron Falk and his father in the death of Ellie Deacon, on the flimsiest evidence, and then to accept the deaths of the Hadlers as murder-suicide when anyone could see the gaping holes in the scenario. The careful drip feed of information from the past (recent and more distant past) in italicized flashbacks begins to feel too carefully edited. The solution to the secondary mystery -- who killed Ellie Deacon, or did she commit suicide? -- is solved by the most lucky of lucky breaks.
BUT -- well-written, engaging, and timely. I'll be first in the queue when Jane Harper's next book comes out ...
SECOND THOUGHTS, having reread this for a book group.
Harper is a keeper, that's for sure. I've now read three of her novels, and re-read one, and I'd say that her grade overall is a very, very solid B+ -- two A-, and one very readable B-. I felt the same headlong rush to read on, and turn the pages, and figure out what the heck happened as I did the first time. Felt the same sense of place, and given the terrible news from Australia in recent weeks, the same dreadful sense of good, hard-working people living on the edge of a catastrophe -- the murder of the Hadler family seems like an apt metaphor for what can happen in tiny increments, or one terrible rush of fire, to any family living in an Outback town like Kiewarra.
If I have dropped my rating down one star, from the breathless 5-* I gave it on first reading, it's because I think some of the cracks show. The locals are drawn as just a little too sheep-like, too willing to accept first, the guilt of Aaron Falk and his father in the death of Ellie Deacon, on the flimsiest evidence, and then to accept the deaths of the Hadlers as murder-suicide when anyone could see the gaping holes in the scenario. The careful drip feed of information from the past (recent and more distant past) in italicized flashbacks begins to feel too carefully edited. The solution to the secondary mystery -- who killed Ellie Deacon, or did she commit suicide? -- is solved by the most lucky of lucky breaks.
BUT -- well-written, engaging, and timely. I'll be first in the queue when Jane Harper's next book comes out ...
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