“It’s the panic that gets you. Makes it hard to trust what you’re seeing.”

Tall gums. Tasman National Park, Tasman Peninsula. May 2021.

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

Much like The Dry, I found this one a gripping little police procedural with a small cast of characters, an intriguing mystery and a suitably claustrophobic setting. Like the earlier novel, the landscape is at the forefront of generating tension. This time around, the dark, cool temperate rainforest of Victoria's east replaces the dry and arid plains of the northwest. However, ghosts of the past remain.

Events move at a cracking pace, and the narrative jumps backwards and forwards across multiple perspectives. Then, finally, the story moves back towards the explanation as to exactly what happened out there in the bush. Harper has chosen a particularly odious bunch of corporate women within which she centres her mystery. Suffice to say, there are plenty of candidates from this small bunch with whom we'd enjoy some comeuppance.

The book deftly treads the line between exciting, engaging and pacy and doesn't outstay its welcome. The villains are suitably villainous, the wounded damaged (but not entirely beyond repair). Our hero Aaron Falk remains aloof but charming and is slowly working his way towards healing. We even get the slightest hint of romance in the air to spice things up. The perfect palate cleanser after a run of the heavier stuff!

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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