Books: The Dry (Aaron Falk #1) by Jane Harper

“In the grip of the worst drought in a century, the farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily when three members of a local family are found brutally slain. Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk reluctantly returns to his hometown for the funeral of his childhood friend, loath to face the townsfolk who turned their backs on him twenty years earlier. But as questions mount, Falk is forced to probe deeper into the deaths of the Hadler family. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret. A secret Falk thought was long buried. A secret Luke's death now threatens to bring to the surface in this small Australian town, as old wounds bleed into new ones.” 

While The Dry has the familiar set-up common with this genre (prodigal son returns, murder of childhood friend you’ve not seen in decades, bitter old men who hates everyone), the debut novel by Australian author Jane Harper reads like she’s been publishing for a while, as writing and pacing were excellent, and had some fully fleshed characters. 

At its core, it’s a recognizable police procedural more than a whodunit (though it is, and while I kind of figured it out, the reasons were shocking), but because the characters are distinctive and recognizable, you get swept up in their drama. And for a small town deep into the suburbs of Melbourne, it’s got a bunch of secrets and people who seem out of place there. I mean, it’s not an insular place, it welcomes new people, but clearly the secrets the town keeps is just as killing as the drought.

It’s atmospheric and dirty, dusty and dry. It’s dark, and for those who dislike children being killed might be turned off by it, though it’s not really a violent book. Still, it’s a rock-solid debut and great for readers of a slow-burning crime drama. 

There was a film adaptation of this book, released in 2020 (though delayed due to COVID until January 2021) starring Eric Bana and ANDOR’s Genevieve O'Reilly. A huge hit in its own country, the film did modest sales in theaters here in the US before vanishing (I think it’s on NETFLIX now).

Books: Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen (1995)

“Two honeymooners wake up early, make love twice, and brace themselves for a spectacle they won't be watching from the sidelines. A seductive con artist stumbles into a scam that promises more cool cash than the lottery. A shotgun-toting mobile home salesman is about to close a deal with disaster. A law school dropout will be chasing one Gaboon viper, a troop of storm-shocked monkeys, and a newfound love life, while tourists by the thousands bail from the Florida Keys. We're now entering the hurricane zone, where hell and hilarity rule.”

As a columnist for the Miami Herald, once again Hiaasen used his knowledge of reporting on the storm to highlight the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida for this novel. (It’s never named, the storm, by the way, but this book was released in 1995. The the storm happened in 1992, and features an unnamed Republican president that is probably George Bush, Sr.) It seems the aftermath of Hurricane turned out to be fertile ground for real-life corruption and incompetence in the construction industry and local and state governments. Hiaasen wrote several scathing columns about it, where he derided the industry's and government's apologists for describing Andrew as "the storm of the century," which seemed designed to excuse them from their own ineptitude by exaggerating the force of the hurricane.

As for the novel, it’s features (what I’ve learned only in reading handful of his titles) Hiaasen's usual formula: a confused female victim of the greedy jerk rescued by the "crazy" recluse and the caring, law-enforcement hero, along with some preachiness on greed, environmental protection, with a despicable villain (of which they’re many) named Snapper. It’s a good theme, I guess, and it’s clear only liberals will enjoy the tale. I mean none of the characters are without fault; all appear very easily swayed in breaking the law for a large payoff. Yeah, at times it was hard to care for any of them, even if most of them were cartoonish in nature. It also features the third appearance of Skink, AKA, former Governor Clinton Tyree, and Jim Tile, who both previously appeared in Double Whammy and Native Tongue.

Still, despite being a bit overlong, Hiaasen is a very clever writer with a twisted and dark sense of humor. In Stormy Weather, it almost works, because as you read, you take in the satire and how all the plot threads come somewhat together, but the author had an ax to grind and he takes no prisoners when pointing out corruption that seems live within the mud of Florida.