The Dry by Jane Harper was one of the most spoken crime/thrillers of last year. It was everywhere but I had so many books to read! I looked and looked at the reviews in other blogs until I feel like I was ready to read this book…

And I did it!

Well, first of all I must say the book is very well written. It’s atmospheric and the characters and their psychological/emotional skeletons are well built.

In the endless literary ocean of troubled DCI’s, Aaron Falk is yet again a lonely detective with a haunting past. He has daddy issues like all the best cowboys have.

The story starts when Falk’s childhood friend Luke and his family found dead in their house. Did Luke kill his wife and 6 year old? Then why did he leave his 1 year old daughter alive? There is no one else near by their house when it happened. There is no one with a visible reason to kill them. So when Falk returns to his hometown for the funeral, he not only mourns for his loss but also starts investigating what really happened on Luke’s farm on that day…

This isn’t a bad book however it was very slow for me. The start was cinematographic and very intriguing but it took so long for me to get into the story.

To me, the whole book was about doubt. In a dry, drought land friends suspect their friends, fathers suspect their sons, and secrets buried under farm roofs. It was well built, but I wish the flashbacks weren’t as frequent as they were. At some points the flashbacks were just too much for me to hold onto the present story.

Also as you can understand there is a terrible crime committed and it is a nasty one.  The worst thing about this novel for me was the retelling of this horrible event from different perspectives. Believe me, I really, really, really don’t enjoy reading how a 6 year old is murdered.

I wish I had the strong heart to read and enjoy that bits of this story but I couldn’t. Just NO. So I wish it wasn’t told as naked as it was.There are horrible things happening in the world, yes but that doesn’t mean I enjoy reading them.

I am currently reading the second book in the series, The Force of Nature, the second Aaron Falk book and I will be hosting a blog tour on 11th February. Really excited about it and looking forward to get to know Falk a bit more! And fingers crossed The Force of Nature doesn’t have any murdered children in!