Jane Harper once again shines a light on the secret lives of teenagers.Credit:Hugh Stewart
LikeThe Dry,the book opens with an abandoned child and a mystery:six-week-old Zoe Gillespie is discovered cocooned in her bassinet in the pram bay of the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Fair while her mother,Kim,has gone missing presumed drowned. There will,nevertheless,be many reported sightings of Kim on that fateful night.
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One year later,and Falk is on his way back to Marralee in South Australia in a second attempt to stage the christening of his soon-to-be godson,Henry Aaron Raco. Henry is the youngest child of Falk’s policeman friend whom he met some five years earlier in Kiewarra,the small-town setting forThe Dry. Harper neatly stitches the backstory ofThe Dry into the present,with some updates about the characters we met that helps establish the continuity of Falk’s fictional world.
While the first christening was abandoned because of Kim’s disappearance,given she was the former partner of Raco’s brother Charlie,with whom she also had a daughter,there is a determination that the second will go ahead. It will,however,be preceded by an appeal at the annual fair initiated by Kim’s 17-year-old daughter Zara,who can’t accept either that her mother would simply abandon her family or that she would have drowned herself in the local reservoir. Suicide is the go-to solution,although the body has never been found.
While the mystery of Kim’s disappearance might be the narrative hook on which this crime novel hangs,what renders it so engaging is Harper’s keen observation of people and place captured in swift glimpses. Meeting his godson after a year,the toddler fixes Falk with a “glassy accusing gaze”,while his little sister Eva shyly slides a glittery hairclip into Falk’s hand. This is what small children do. Falk is clearly touched by this young family and their kindness as he contemplates an alternative country lifestyle on Charlie’s vineyard miles away from his workaholic existence in Melbourne.
Harper enables these comparisons through a series of flashbacks. They include the occasion when Falk first encounters Gemma Tozer,the director of the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival,in a Melbourne bar while they are both waiting for Raco. Falk is one year out of another failed relationship with a woman who like him,always put her work first,though the damage appears to have been minimal,“the gaps had closed over as though they had never been there”. Ouch.