The Dry
After twenty years away, federal investigator Aaron Falk returns to the small farming town of Kiewarra for a funeral he cannot refuse. His childhood best friend, Luke Hadler, is dead—along with Luke's wife and young son—in what the town has already decided was a murder-suicide driven by the worst drought in a century. Falk means only to pay his respects and leave, but Luke's grieving parents ask him to look closer, and the town's old hostility toward Falk makes staying dangerous.
As he digs into the Hadler deaths, Falk is forced to confront the reason he left Kiewarra in the first place: the drowning of a teenage girl named Ellie, a death that was blamed, quietly and cruelly, on him and Luke. The two cases begin to bleed into one another, and the parched, suffocating landscape presses in as long-buried secrets rise to the surface.
Jane Harper's award-winning debut is a tense, atmospheric crime novel in which the Australian outback is as much a character as the people who scratch a living from it. The first book in the Aaron Falk series, The Dry is a slow-burning mystery about guilt, memory, and the things small towns choose to forget.
A federal financial-crimes investigator drawn back to his hometown to look into a friend's death.
Falk's late childhood friend, whose death sets the investigation in motion.
A seventeen-year-old who drowned in Kiewarra two decades earlier, a death that was blamed on Falk and Luke.
Luke's wife, killed alongside him and their son, and a school receptionist who had recently uncovered a financial irregularity.
Luke and Karen's six-year-old son, killed alongside his parents in the incident Falk returns to investigate.
Yes. The Dry is the first book in Jane Harper's Aaron Falk trilogy, followed by Force of Nature (2017) and Exiles (2022).
Jane Harper's debut won the 2017 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, the 2017 CWA Gold Dagger, the 2018 British Book Award for Crime & Thriller Book of the Year, and multiple 2017 Australian Book Industry Awards, among other honors.
Yes. The Dry was adapted into a 2020 Australian film starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk, directed by Robert Connolly.