Thursday, March 3, 2022

Jane Harper

“Brothers Nathan and Bub Bright meet for the first time in months at the remote fence line seperating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback. Their third brother, Cameron, lies dead at their feet.

In an isolated belt of Queensland, Australia, their homes a three-hour drive apart, the brothers were one another’s nearest neighbors. Cameron was the middle child, the one who ran the family homestead. But something made him head out alone under the unrelenting sun.

Nathan, Bub, and Nathan’s son return to Cameron’s ranch and to those left behind by his passing: his wife, his daughters, and his mother, as well as their long-time employee and two recently hired seasonal workers. While they grieve Cameron’s loss, suspicion starts to take hold, and Nathan is forced to examine secrets the family would rather leave in the past. Because if someone forced Cameron to his death, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects."

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This was the second book I read that was written by Jane Harper. The first was The Dry. The lives described in both books were so surprisingly different from our lives here in Taiwan. In The Dry, I first realized that water supply is such a big issue in Australia. The dry season can last for years!! In this book, I found it amazing that it takes hours just to drive to your nearest neighbor!!

I felt so sad to read about a mother who was forced to murdered her son, so that she could save her family.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Jane Harper

“Federal agent Aaron Falk hasn’t been back to the place where he grew up in twenty years. Not since he and his father were run out of town. Even when Falk gets word that his childhood best friend, Luke, is dead and his entire family has been murdered, Falk still isn’t planning on going back. But then he gets a note: Luke lied. You liked. Be at the funeral. And just like that, Falk is swept back into the secrets of the place and people he left so long ago.

When Falk returns for the funeral, Luke’s parents implore him to look into his death – though everyone else in town thinks the case is open-and-shut, they’re sure something’s not right. But as Falk himself knows, it’s hard to get people to change their minds, and sometimes things are not as they appear. Amid the worst drought in a century, long-buried mysteries will resurface, as will the lies that accompany them. And Falk will discover anew what he’s known all along: Sometimes you have to go back home in order to finally leave your past behind.

SOMETIMES IT’S THE SMALLEST OF TOWNS THAT HIDE THE BIGGEST OF SECRETS …

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At first, I couldn’t understand why Falk’s childhood friend, Gretchen Schoner, kept saying that everybody in the town is feeling depressed because of the drought. To me, in Taiwan, the worst kind of dry season would last no longer than few months. How bad can it be? Until I did some research about The Big Dry in Australia. It began in 1996, and Australia was finally ‘drought-free’ in 2012!!

The river where they used to go swimming, where their childhood friend drowned herself, now almost dries out. What happened twenty years ago and what just happened, are all brought together.