Overall, while I did like Jane Harper’s Exiles, I wasn’t completely bowled over by it as other readers have been. This is a wonderfully engaging and dark crime read, with a fabulous sense of location, that I wholeheartedly recommend both to fans of Jane Harper and to other crime and mystery readers. Though her body was never found, the general consensus is that she snuck out of the festival and jumped to her death into the nearby reservoir.

Given that each mystery in the Aaron Falk series is different (as is the setting) you could dive into this one without having read the others, and be able to follow it no problem. She was swaddled carefully in a clean wrap purchased from the state's leading baby-wares retailer, and tucked in with an artisan wool blanket, thick enough to have the effect of flattening out the bundle of her shape if placed in the right way. From the small town in a drought in ‘the dry’, to the remote bushland of ‘Force of nature’, the parched cattle ranches of outback Queensland in ‘The lost man’, and most recently, the small Tasmanian beach town of ’ The survivors’. Mickey on her police beat and Kacey in the shadows of the city's darkest corners where the drug addicts and sex workers preside.He and Greg worked together policing in the past, so the kids and others turn to them both for help. Aaron is part of the financial division of the Australian Federal Police working in Victoria, nothing to do with a missing person or death in the neighbouring state of South Australia.

The spaces hold different meanings in terms of both mysteries, as they are quiet and calm spaces, yet they are the backdrop for sinister events. Because of the audio format, it was challenging to go back to refresh my memory about a character's place in the story. I finally got around to seeing ’The dry’ with Eric Bana recently, which I enjoyed - definitely kept to the spirit of the book. The mother, Kim Gillespie, hasn’t been seen since, and the mystery is troubling to this tight knit community. Also, because it’s the final book in the trilogy, and as I’ve mentioned above, it does deal with a lot of Aaron’s internal and external struggles in relation to thoughts, feelings, and past and present experiences that were raised in the first two, particularly The Dry.

Zara is Kim’s daughter with Charlie Raco, Greg’s brother, and she has lived with Kim since her parents split up. We observe how Falk sees the crisscrossing of these friendships and the realization that someone within this tight group knows more than what meets the eye. Harper does a superb job of creating a tight-knit community and all its secrets, and Falk's place as an outsider gives him an advantage. Falk seems to be a workaholic as a financial federal investigator, but now he's back for a happy occasion, Henry's christening. During last year's Food and Wine Festival, a woman named Kim Gillespie disappeared, leaving her baby daughter Zoe alone in her stroller.

Why would Kim, a devoted mother and wife, leave her 6-week-old baby in a pram at a crowded festival and disappear without a trace? The characters also have a relationship to the setting - in this case, they’ve spent time at the site as teenagers, worked at the festival, etc so you can imagine them moving around these places. Jane worked as a print journalist for thirteen years both in Australia and the UK, and now lives in Melbourne. However, there is an incident that occurred in The Dry that is referred to in this one that I consider a spoiler. Seems like a while since we last met him back in ‘Force of nature’ and I like him as a character - there’s a quiet dignity to him, a sense that he still believes in some sort of truth.It was a spring night and the South Australian sky was clear and starry with no rain forecast, but the weatherproof hood had been pulled over to full stretch. Barossa Valley, altra zona vinicola dell’Australia del sud usata da Jane Harper per ambientare il romanzo.