This will hurt me...

Blue sky and power lines, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Lost Man   by Jane Harper A slow-burn mystery set in the hot and dry southwest of Queensland (the bit that is closer to Adelaide than Brisbane), I enjoyed  The Lost Man  a lot. While it is something of a murder mystery, the story isn't driven by a police investigation. It progresses through the examination of the intergenerational trauma of one dysfunctional farming family. More exploration of how brutalised Australian men deal with such trauma than boilerplate mystery, Harper adroitly captures the harsh landscape that centres the whole work. It is a strong addition to her previous books and continues the shift towards a more nuanced understanding of masculinity and loneliness in Australian settings. Well worth your time. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

  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, ...

Communication tower, Natone Hill, Geilston Bay. March 2021. The Dry   by Jane Harper An entertaining little police procedural set in country Victoria. Standard 'big city cop returns to small home town and gets caught up in murder (and past ghosts)' motif, and I enjoyed it well enough. A fair few red herrings are tossed about to undermine the resolution of the stories behind the various deaths (especially with the river dried up). The central figure of Aaron Falk is an interesting one, and I am likely to read more of the series featuring the detective. It served as an excellent palate-cleanser after the heady going of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's  The Discomfort of Evening . ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2