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Luke Hadler may have had a light on waiting for him when he came home, but something else from this wretched, desperate community had seeped through that front door and into his home. And it had been rotten and thick and black enough to extinguish that light forever.

The Dry actually makes me feel vindicated in my rating and review of Ritter's Bonfire last year. I got some criticisms that I was being too harsh toward a debut author; that a lot of thrillers follow a familiar format but that doesn't make them bad. Then, in swoops Harper here, a debut novelist, writing a mystery/thriller story whose foundations are very similar to Bonfire (and other works in the genre) and yet it is utterly gripping.

You know how the bare bones of these stories go. The protagonist is a small-towner who leaves and becomes a cop (lawyer, P.I., etc.) in the big city, then returns to his/her hometown to figure out some unfinished business from the past and solve a new crime. They, of course, get caught up in the small town politics and tensions.

Bonfire tried on this premise - unsuccessfully, in my opinion. Flynn did something very similar in Sharp Objects. The whole notion of "genre" generally relies on authors playing by a certain set of rules. Whether these recycled narratives work, however, depends on the details. Are the characters interesting? Is the writing compelling? Do we care? I think Harper did a great job on all three.

Firstly, The Dry is atmospheric to an intoxicating extent. Harper uses really evocative description to make you feel the burning heat and the suffocating lack of moisture amid the drought in this rural Australian community. The sun blazes. The blowflies hover. It's the perfect place for a murder.

Aaron Falk returns to his hometown after twenty years away to attend a funeral. The funeral is for his old friend Luke Hadler, Luke's wife Karen, and his six-year-old son Billy. The story goes that Luke cracked under the stress of financial pressure and shot his family, leaving only baby Charlotte alive, before putting a bullet in himself. But there's just enough doubt to make Falk question this popular verdict.

Along with local police newbie, Raco, Falk finds himself drawn into the case, as well as the lives, tensions and conflicts of the people in the town. His own past gets dragged up and Falk is forced to question whether there might be some connection between what happened to Luke's family and what happened all those years ago.

The author expertly leads us down several roads that turn out to be red herrings and manages to pull out a dramatic and surprising conclusion. If you're a suspicious mystery reader like me - as in, you suspect everyone - then you might guess who did it, but I doubt very much you will guess the whys. And I personally think this is what makes a good mystery - the unveiling of the tale and the whys of the crime are good enough to make it okay if you guess whodunnit.

A really impressive start to this new series starring Aaron Falk. Sign me up for the next book!

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