The Dry, which earned the Sunday Times' crime fiction of the year title for 2017, is billed as the first in a series featuring Aaron Falk, a Melbourne-based detective. (That's Melbourne Australia rather than Derbyshire, for the 2 per cent of year who immediately thought of an East Midlands murder mystery).
I hope it is only the first, as The Dry announces Jane Harper as a writer capable of delivering atmospheric plots which pack a sharp and accurate punch.
While Melbourne might be home to Falk, it is not the setting for The Dry, in which he returns home to Kiewarra, the Victoria outback town he grew up in. Falk is reluctantly back in town to attend the funeral of his schooldays best friend Luke Hadler, a farmer who has killed himself and his family in a murder-suicide.
The rationale given for Hadler's act is the desperate state of the farming economy in a one-industry town brought low by a years-long drought that threatens the very survival of Kiewarra. But Hadler's parents, once almost surrogate parents to Falk himself, don't believe their son had it in him to harm his family. They ask Falk to look into the circumstances around the death.
Falk is a cop but one whose day to day work involves financial crime rather than vicious murder-suicides with shotguns. Nonetheless, out of sympathy and loyalty to Hadler's devastated parents, he agrees to stick around for a day or two and look into it.
But even as he quickly comes to the view that there is sufficient evidence to doubt Hadler's guilt, he is also confronted with the shadows of his own murky past in Kiewarra, a series of events that comes to the surface as he begins to unravel the layers of secrecy and tension in the modern town.
As Harper has shown in her subsequent novels, and in particular The Lost Man, she is capable of creating an incredible sense of place in her writing. The landscape here will be familiar to those who have watched the harrowing scenes of Australia´s recent catastrophic bushfire season. The environment is bone dry in the midst of a record drought, and the oppressive heat and potential consequences create a literal and human tinderbox. You can feel the heat from the page. But her skill extends beyond that, the characters feel hewn from their environment, many either a sense of menace or a quiet desperation.
This is a great debut novel, a seething slow burner that unfolds beautifully.