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Jane harper the lost man review5/29/2023 ![]() Would a local to that environment really have parked his car, left all of its supplies of food and water and other survival gear, and walked out into the barren wilderness to perish under the desert sun? It’s a scenario that couldn’t be explored just anywhere, but one that is rendered for this volume in stark #ownvoices authenticity. That’s one of the elements I love most about her writing, and it is honed to perfection for the lonely vistas here. Some plot developments are easy to predict, and the story grows into more of a traditional hunt for clues as it goes along, but the primary focus throughout is on the characters and their complicated relationships with one another.Īs always, Harper treats the remote outback setting almost like a character in its own right, penning evocative descriptions of the unforgiving landscape. Instead, this time the author has turned in more of a contemplative, Celeste Ng-esque narrative about the dead man’s family, whose history we come to learn while we watch them processing his death (which everyone initially takes to be a suicide, anyway). Given such bona fides, and the fact that this third novel opens with yet another corpse, I can’t have been the only reader expecting to find those same familiar procedural beats of a police investigation. Australian writer Jane Harper’s first two books fit explicitly within the mystery / crime thriller genre, featuring a detective protagonist and clear whodunnit cases to solve. ![]()
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