On a warm spring night, during a busy festival in South Australia’s wine region, a six week old baby sleeps in her pram. Her mother is nowhere to be seen.
A year on, Kim Gillespie is still nowhere to be found. Investigator Aaron Falk, who works for Australia’s financial crimes department, heads down to old friends for the baptism of their young son, but as he meets their extended group of relatives, friends and acquaintances, he starts to be drawn into the mystery.
It can be hard to find a thriller that pays attention to detail, that takes its time, that doesn’t rely on cheap plot twists: apparently, the average reader can only hang on for so many pages without having to be slapped in the face by some narrative mostrosity. On Facebook book groups, people often speak of a slow burn of a book. The term is not ubiquitously regarded as something positive, but I’ve always preferred books that had character development over ham-fisted plot twists. Harper’s The Dry has been on my TBR-list for a while now, but I couldn’t manage to get my hands on it. So when this popped up in my local library, I decided to give it a go instead.
It’s the third (and possibly last) book in a series of three, but the first two books are only vaguely alluded to; there’s not a lot of backstory, or if there is, I still managed to enjoy this book without knowing anything about it. Falk, as a main character, is somewhat enigmatic, but also soothing. He’s refreshingly normal; he works hard, but his job doesn’t typically put him in the line of fire. He’s kind to women, kind to kids and animals. His friends are warm people who genuinely care about him, and he cares about them. He’s calm and collected, and his private life is unremarkable if a bit lonely. He’s a satisfying protagonist: not flashy enough to interfere with the story, but interesting enough to keep the reader engaged.
The central mystery of the book is solidly constructed, even if the final resolution felt almost too easy; it did keep me guessing for a good long while. (There’s a secondary mystery as well; the solution to that one was, unfortunately, very obvious from the start, but whatever). The book is almost placid and languid in its pace. Nobody’s in a rush and Falk isn’t there to solve crimes; he’s there to be with his friends. In a world where so many thrillers confuse excitement with chaos and where character development is routinely traded for pace, a slow burn like this one is a welcome distraction.