Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
Five years ago, Ro and Griff Crowley waited for their son, Sam, to come home for his 21st birthday family dinner. He never arrived.
Now she is heading back to the shrinking community of Carralon Ridge for the annual memorial of his disappearance. She knows she will find a much-diminished place, and a husband who stayed, while she could not. Their beloved daughter will also join them there. All three will be looking for answers, and if not answers, then at the very least, resolution.
This is a Jane Harper novel – so there are a few certainties that the reader can look forward to. It will be a cracking story, the characters will be finely drawn and totally believable, the mystery element will be revealed slowly and thrillingly, and resolution will come, one way or another.
When Ro arrives back in Carralon, she finds not only a diminished town, but a near-derelict one. The mine company that might have brought prosperity to the place has eaten into it – bought up homes at an increasingly knock-down rate, broken families, and caused despair and disharmony amongst those stubborn enough to still live there. Many of these are friends of Ro and Griff, including the two boys who grew up with Sam.
Slowly, reading and rereading the notes Sam had made on the town for his university course, Ro realises there are discrepancies in the stories told to her son by those he interviewed. Talking to old friends only serves to make her more uncomfortably aware of these discrepancies. She and Griff go over old ground and trace their son’s final footsteps time and again until the cracks open and fissures appear. Until it seems that some of the friendly faces that are sharing their pain are in fact masks. One or more of those who will be at Sam’s memorial are hiding the truth of his disappearance. Desperate to discover the truth and yet terrified of what that truth might be, Ro cannot stop. Whatever these run-down buildings and run-down people are covering up, she will find out.
Australia, as always with Jane Harper’s writing, is as much as character in this book as are her people. The claustrophobia of the dying town is as dusty as that thrown up by the mine. The thudding tension that grows mirrors the beat of the machinery that rattles the windows and shakes the furniture. It may be slow, but the unease grows and grows in this first class novel until that promised resolution arrives. Like it or not.
