When Jane Harper’s debut novel The Dry took off in 2016, lovers of thrillers and Australian literature knew there was an exciting new talent on the scene.
Jane Harper followed The Dry with a book a year and, in my humble opinion, none - bar her third book, The Lost Man, set in outback Queensland - had quite the impact of her debut novel. However, with Exiles, she is back in form.
Set in a fictional Australian wine region, like those of the Gippsland in Victoria or the Barossa Valley of South Australia, Harper brings back her lead character from her first novel, Aaron Falk, a Federal agent from Melbourne, and introduces a cast of supporting characters, all with traumas and tragedies in their backstories.
Immediately the reader becomes an amateur sleuth and starts to hypothesise if they could have had any bearing on the disappearance of a young mother at a Wine Show Fairground. Why would she have left her infant child parked outside the ladies' toilets, fed and warm in her pram, and walked away? Shades of Sylvia Plath and abandoned children you think? Did she have postpartum depression, and is this suicide? So we settle into the story and follow our clever and psychologically astute detective as he methodically gets to work.
As Harper is now such a big name in the thriller genre, you find yourself interested in how the author's own life - now the mother of two small children - has contributed to the story. A lot is my guess and this resonates with the warmth and depth of the characters. All this is to say that Harper is really good at her craft, and, as in The Dry, the least likely murderer is the culprit. This is not giving anything away as all the characters are presented as likeable characters until suddenly they are not.
Creepy is the best word for this story. Nature, (as in The Lost Man,) provides the ever-present sinister background “character” and the others slowly reveal themselves. When the murder is eventually solved, Harper skilfully lays out small signs of hope for the assorted cast. She reassures us that humanity is mostly good and good will prevail - even in a thriller.
I am so glad Harper has got it right again. Read it in a few sittings and remember that Harper was a journalist for a decade before she turned to fiction. She knows how to keep the story tight, intriguing, and ever so satisfying to read.
Reviewed by Jenny Ainge
