Kiewarra suffers from many of the same ailments as many an American small town. As readers of Heartlands will know, tales of rural places always catch my eye, and Harper does a wonderful job of bringing the Australian backcountry to life. I could see enough of that in The Dry to pick it up. The ways we find ourselves stripped of pretension, bared to the bone, and utterly dependent on an elusive, assured God. The ways the land speaks in our stories and shapes our souls. The ways we find ourselves in the grip of unseen forces like history, race, and desire. What attracts me in literature is the untidy and unfinished. It’s all very cinematic, ( Reese Witherspoon has the production rights), and I was suitably caught off guard by the way it all wound up.īut then again, I never guess these things. And sure enough, The Dry heads inexorably toward such a conclusion in which red herrings are exposed and surprise twists revealed. I generally don’t like books where I can feel the mechanics of the plot whirring beneath the page heading for an inevitable tidy resolution. Jane Harper’s debut thriller, The Dry, is not in my usual reading wheelhouse. So it’s an ominous sign when these end-time harbingers descend upon a small farm in the Australian bush outside the town of Kiewarra and find three bodies. They know the smell of death and where to find it. It begins with the blowflies, as good a symbol as any for what happens to rural areas when the weather turns stagnant, hot, and deadly.
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