Jane Harper made a sensation just a few years ago with her debut, "The Dry." A second novel--"Force of Nature"--wasn't as celebrated. Now people are saying "The Lost Man" is her best book. She had been a reporter for something like thirteen years before turning to crime fiction.
When people use the term "slow burn," I get nervous. I'd prefer a fast burn. But "slow burn"--done well--can be very enjoyable. What do you need for an effective slow burn? You need to persuade the reader--from sentence one--that important, shocking information is being withheld. Everything that happens--no matter how apparently pedestrian--needs to have an aura of dread; you have to tease and frustrate the reader, with full confidence that you can deliver the goods. Confidence that the revelations will be worth the wait.
I have that confidence--as I make my way through the first third of "Lost Man"--because the heavy-hitter Val McDermid has endorsed the book. Also, because I'm starting to see the unspooling of the weirdness.
Three brothers live in a flat wasteland--in a desolate and extremely hot region. The hottest region in Australia. The area is so quiet, you can live three hours away from your nearest neighbor. It's an area where you can stray off a road and then easily find yourself permanently lost (and, very quickly, dead). So we're already thinking about those tourists who have wandered off paths in Joshua Tree, or in Alaska, and then, pretty quickly, croaked.
Harper then makes clear that a dead body--one of the three brothers--has been found, and that the killer (or the person who drove the man in question to suicide) is very likely a family member. That's because the family members share some property--and there's basically no one else around. If you want groceries, in this area, you put an order in six weeks in advance, and eventually a truck--carrying all the groceries for everyone living within a radius of hundreds of miles--makes its way over. You have to plan carefully. That's the only way to eat.
The brother who died was the Favorite Son; the brother we follow is actually sort of an outcast. We don't know why, because it's clear the brother doesn't really want to revisit the scandalous thing that happened to him, or that he caused to happen. (Isn't this like life?)
And yet circumstances--the investigation surrounding the death--cause the ne'er-do-well brother to start to examine his past. And we learn--pretty quickly--that he once slept with the woman who became his sister-in-law, and that he then did something atrocious on the road (perhaps drunkenly murdered a few pedestrians?) ...and then we're hooked.
"The Lost Man" has a spooky semi-ghost story thrown in, and it has a cunning, intermittently- incredulous investigator. It's a crime-cover-up-detection story--but we don't even know if a murder has occurred, or even a suicide. (The now-dead brother may simply have been in some distress, and may have randomly found himself lost.) I'm also drawn to the avuncular figure--or the falsely-avuncular figure--who knows just a bit too much about the location of the body (and maybe gives himself away by revealing facts he shouldn't have known).
Have I sold you on this book? You'll hear about it a fair amount; Harper is already a big deal. The hype is earned. Happy reading!
When people use the term "slow burn," I get nervous. I'd prefer a fast burn. But "slow burn"--done well--can be very enjoyable. What do you need for an effective slow burn? You need to persuade the reader--from sentence one--that important, shocking information is being withheld. Everything that happens--no matter how apparently pedestrian--needs to have an aura of dread; you have to tease and frustrate the reader, with full confidence that you can deliver the goods. Confidence that the revelations will be worth the wait.
I have that confidence--as I make my way through the first third of "Lost Man"--because the heavy-hitter Val McDermid has endorsed the book. Also, because I'm starting to see the unspooling of the weirdness.
Three brothers live in a flat wasteland--in a desolate and extremely hot region. The hottest region in Australia. The area is so quiet, you can live three hours away from your nearest neighbor. It's an area where you can stray off a road and then easily find yourself permanently lost (and, very quickly, dead). So we're already thinking about those tourists who have wandered off paths in Joshua Tree, or in Alaska, and then, pretty quickly, croaked.
Harper then makes clear that a dead body--one of the three brothers--has been found, and that the killer (or the person who drove the man in question to suicide) is very likely a family member. That's because the family members share some property--and there's basically no one else around. If you want groceries, in this area, you put an order in six weeks in advance, and eventually a truck--carrying all the groceries for everyone living within a radius of hundreds of miles--makes its way over. You have to plan carefully. That's the only way to eat.
The brother who died was the Favorite Son; the brother we follow is actually sort of an outcast. We don't know why, because it's clear the brother doesn't really want to revisit the scandalous thing that happened to him, or that he caused to happen. (Isn't this like life?)
And yet circumstances--the investigation surrounding the death--cause the ne'er-do-well brother to start to examine his past. And we learn--pretty quickly--that he once slept with the woman who became his sister-in-law, and that he then did something atrocious on the road (perhaps drunkenly murdered a few pedestrians?) ...and then we're hooked.
"The Lost Man" has a spooky semi-ghost story thrown in, and it has a cunning, intermittently- incredulous investigator. It's a crime-cover-up-detection story--but we don't even know if a murder has occurred, or even a suicide. (The now-dead brother may simply have been in some distress, and may have randomly found himself lost.) I'm also drawn to the avuncular figure--or the falsely-avuncular figure--who knows just a bit too much about the location of the body (and maybe gives himself away by revealing facts he shouldn't have known).
Have I sold you on this book? You'll hear about it a fair amount; Harper is already a big deal. The hype is earned. Happy reading!
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