The latest thriller from Jane Harper, the bestselling author of The Dry, opens on a familiar landscape: desolate rural Australia, a setting marked with discomfort and decay. In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town on the brink of ruin, a young man goes missing. Five years later, on the eve of his 21st birthday, the community comes together for their annual vigil. While his mother, Ro, has all but given up hope that her son Sam is alive, she’s still desperate for the answers that will allow her to say goodbye.
As in her other books, Harper makes good use of the environment, using the parched, arid farmlands to reinforce an atmosphere of isolation and abandonment. While the descriptions sometimes border on the commonplace – the paddocks, once green, now “brown and patchy, dotted in places by the odd sparse copse of sickly eucalyptus trees”, the “patchy lawn” outside houses half-abandoned – Harper captures the contemporary tensions troubling this well-worn archetype. Such as the nearby coalmine, a “dark stain” on Carralon Ridge and its inhabitants:
