A group of five men and five women set off on a corporate-sponsored hike through an Australian forest. The men emerge successfully three days later, happy to be done with it, to return to the hotel and its bar, but the women fail to appear. When they do, they are one person short: Alice Russell is missing. Detective Aaron Falk and his partner Carmen set off to investigate because Alice Russell is the whistleblower in their latest case. They soon discover that the women’s stories are contradictory, and that none of them liked Alice Russell very much.
The scariest thing about this book is really the idea of having to go on a corporate hike for three days and camp out in the Australian forest. As someone with directional insanity and an absolute inability to read a map, I sympathise. I do like camping, but I do not like Australian spiders. Outside of that, though, this is a solid thriller, well-written and layered.
Harper is quickly becoming my favourite in the genre; I’ve yet to read a book of hers that let me down. Her stories are always well-constructed and pensive, with plenty of attention for the characters and their interpersonal relationships. They’re also largely free of melodrama; I love Karin Slaughter but the way her characters often scream, swoon and fuck in various degrees of hysteria can be a bit exhausting. Harper steers away from that. It’s also nice to see that, at the end of the day, most people are just… Decent. They screw up, sure, and sometimes they’re mean or harsh, they lie or twist the truth, but generally they’re okay in all their imperfections. There’s something comforting about that as well.
Here, in particular, the story veers from the present, which we see through Falk’s eyes, and the past, which is written from the perspective of all the women on the hike save for Alice. The relationship dynamics are messy: there’s Lauren, Alice’s school friend; Jill, her boss, who was reluctantly drafted into the family company by her parents; twins Bree and Beth, who have a past and don’t really get along; and Alice herself, tough and unforgiving, generally feared and disliked but kept on for her competence. Occasionally, they could’ve been fleshed out a bit more; Harper seems to want to make Alice as unpalatable as possible. Generally, though, it’s easy to see where the hike goes wrong, and the bickering that ensues seems entirely realistic. The central mystery kept me guessing; it’s well-constructed and Harper has a clever way of weaving a net of clues that slowly reels you in to show you what went down.
Falk himself is the investigator, but never really the focus of the story. He’s quiet, pensive, friendly but persistent. He works together well, he’s not the tough-as-nails rogue cop that so many thrillers seem to prefer (and thank God for that, because crime-solving is typically teamwork). I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on the next book in the series.