It wasn't as though the farm hadn't seen death before, and the blowflies didn't discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.The prologue to The Dry – with blowflies seeking, and finding, the glassy eyes and wet wounds where they love to feed – fittingly sets the mood and scene for this book: the wide-open and drought-parched countryside of rural Australia; the scene of a grisly crime. From this opening volley I thought I was going to be in for an interesting and well told story, but I was ultimately disappointed: this first page and a half were the best part of the whole book. I read this crime/mystery novel fairly quickly, but not because I was so engaged that I needed to know what happened; I was mentally detached and powering through to discover how author Jane Harper decided it all happened – I never suspended disbelief, I was aware of and made impatient by red herrings and misdirections as they occurred, and ultimately found the whole “mystery” to be poorly crafted. This just didn't work for me, but as The Dry has high ratings from most reviewers, I understand mine is a minority opinion.
Luke lied. You lied. Be at the funeral.Immediately after the prologue, we meet Aaron Falk: a Federal Agent with the Melbourne PD (specialising in financial crimes), he and his father were run out of the small town of Kiewarra twenty years earlier after their last name was found written on a piece of paper in the pocket of a girl who had died under mysterious circumstances. Having not intended to ever return, Falk was compelled to make the five hour drive from his current home in order to attend the funeral of his former best friend Luke. It would appear that Luke had murdered his wife and child before turning his shotgun on himself, but Luke's parents refuse to believe their son was capable of such a thing: perhaps, as a financial specialist and former family friend, Falk could go over the accounts of their son's cash-strapped farm and look for irregularities? When the local police Sergeant – an outsider who had joined the two man Kiewarra force just weeks before the murders – admits to some doubts of his own, he and Falk team up to take a closer look; forcing Falk to also confront the memories of those events that had led to his own banishment.
Out here, those badges don’t mean as much as they should.Overall, the concept is interesting enough – Falk is trying to solve the two mysteries, has no idea if they are related, and the suspects he might want to interview are either bullies from his youth who aren't impressed by his shiny police badge or are people he didn't really know as a kid, but who all know him; as the guy who probably killed poor Ellie Deacon in high school. And the setting works to amp up the tensions: after two years of drought, the farmers are desperate, their children paint pictures of brown fields and dead livestock, the main street is boarded up, and fistfights break out at the local pub nightly; Kiewarra is literally a tinderbox.
WE WILL SKIN YOU KILLER SCUM.Unfortunately, I found the small-town aggression to be overblown and the mysteries themselves to be pretty thin. I could see what happened in the modern day storyline as soon as characters started dishing out the clues, and anything that might have served as a misdirection if you weren't already thinking along those lines was unnecessary confirmation for me. So, really, I kept reading just to see what happened to Ellie in the past, and when that was revealed, I just mentally shrugged and said, “Okay”. And I didn't like the parallels between the two mysteries – the two notes that made accusations from beyond the grave (and as for the reason why Ellie had the name “Falk” written down, that's just a lame explanation for the ruination of a father and son), the two false alibis meant to protect secret love affairs, Luke out shooting rabbits on the days of both murders. And can I talk about shooting rabbits? Is that all people do around Australian farms? And, yes, it's common knowledge that the misguided introduction of rabbits to Australia devastated the entire ecosystem, and I'm sure they are ruinous to agriculture, but everyone in The Dry is forever popping off bunnies (and do the caretakers of rural elementary schools really have shotguns for shooting rabbits on the playgrounds?) And I didn't find it to be ironic when Falk and Raco have a laugh over the implausible solution to a crime/mystery novel that Karen had been reading before her murder; that's not meta, it's manifest.
There was one scene I liked quite a bit, so I'll give fair warning that this is spoilerish: I found it tense when Aaron and his dad are being literally driven out of town – with Ellie's father chasing them for a hundred kilometres (!) – and when Mal Deacon finally turns back and the elder Falk can pull over and take a breather, the tension is really well maintained. I felt as stung as young Aaron when his father grabs his shirtfront and says, “I'm going to ask you only once: did you have anything to do with Ellie's death?” And when Aaron denies involvement and the desperate father demands, “Then why was your name in her pocket?”, I didn't see it coming and was pleasantly jolted when the offended son snaps back, “Why was yours?” Too bad there weren't more of these enjoyable scenes. It was all just okay, I'd probably give The Dry 2.5 stars if I could and am feeling generous by rounding up. Not for me; maybe for you.
