I was pleased to see this wasn’t a series book as I’d found the second of the Aaron Falk books less engaging than the first, though not enough to put me off reading it if it had been! I enjoyed this as much, if not more, than I did The Dry.

The atmosphere and heat of Australia really came through in this book. For those of us who live in far more compact locales it’s difficult to imagine the distances involved but the explanations of how people could drive for several hours and still be on their own land, of the houses having refrigerated storerooms the size of village shops with only very occasional deliveries and of how much water and supplies you take out in the car with you every time you leave home really got over to me just how isolated the places in the book are. It’s one of those books where the location is almost the star of the show, so the plot needs to be really good to stand up to it.

And I’m glad to say that I thought the mystery was pretty decent here too. The characters seemed like real people, mostly likeable but sometimes flawed, and thought that the way that their backstory slowly pieced itself together and changed your opinion of some of them as you learnt new details was laid out very well.

After three books Jane Harper’s definitely made it onto my list of must-buy authors.