Books
Jane Harper can’t match her startling debut but The Lost Man shows she is an enduring talent, writes Barry Forshaw
Allan Massie on The Amber Seeker by Mandy Haggith
There are times – admittedly, not very often – when a crime fiction debut makes an almost seismic impact on the genre, gleaning rave reviews, selling prodigious quantities and bagging key awards. All of this happened for the first book by Jane Harper, The Dry, which accrued mountains of praise and a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for its atmospherically realised Antipodean setting and strongly drawn cop protagonist, Aaron Falk.
Yet, while perfectly accomplished, the Australian writer’s second book, Force of Nature – featuring a group of women on a gruelling team-building hike across the Giralang Ranges – suggested that the lightning captured in a bottle by The Dry had proved more elusive.
The setting of her third book is Outback Queensland, where lonely farmers lay claim to vast tracts of land.
A body is discovered, apparently the victim of dehydration, by a solitary grave. Cameron Bright appears to have stumbled from his car, experienced disorientation and collapsed.
The dead man is one of three brothers. Nathan, the oldest of the three, is the outsider of the family, living a reclusive life on his own strip of land. The inarticulate Bub, the other surviving brother, is the one who discovers his dead sibling.
The death of Cameron initiates a volatile feud over what will happen to the brothers’ extensive property, and a suspicion of murder is quickly in the mix. Unlike Harper’s earlier work, this is no police procedural (Aaron Falk is absent), and the nearest thing in the book to a detective figure is the conflicted Nathan.
The dusty and malign town of the first book has no real equivalent here; what The Lost Man does have, however, is the same vivid evocation of the Australian landscape that distinguished The Dry. Themes addressed include sexual and domestic abuse, with the caustic divisions in a dysfunctional family laid bare.
All of this is handled with casual skill, but is this as impressive a novel as that first book? Not quite. The characters, while memorable, are not as multifaceted and nuanced as those of The Dry, though Nathan is a compelling creation.
And while the plotting is handled in assured fashion, it is more foregrounded than in the first book – what readers took from Harper’s debut was not so much the narrative details as the superb character interaction and atmosphere, which are less idiosyncratic here.
Nevertheless, those who have acquired a taste for this talented writer need not hesitate – The Lost
Man has a great deal to offer.