Last One Out by Jane Harper
The weatherboard farmhouse. The ivy cottage. The stone bungalow.
You can always tell a Jane Harper thriller.
Set in her native Australia, they are slow-burn psychological explorations of a close-knit community – friends, family, colleagues, loved ones – into which a devastating loss has been introduced. The stories are often set over a span of time, and as they spin out, the cracks and fissures in that community are laid bare, secrets exposed, long-buried dark truths brought to light. Each character is distinct and complete, and that includes the settings. Deserts, forests, the sea – in Harper’s novels, the landscapes are as much of a living, breathing presence as any of the people. You can feel the heat, the isolation, the fury as intensely as if you were standing there yourself.
A Town in Decline
Last One Out is her sixth novel, and this time we are in the dying town of Carralon Ridge. Once a thriving outpost, it is now slowly being subsumed by the coal mine operation that is its neighbor. As family after family moves away, bitter fights have broken out between those who have taken the mine’s offers and those who have refused to budge, though fewer and fewer of the latter remain.
It is against that backdrop that local boy Sam Crowley disappears on his twenty-first birthday. His last remaining traces are the rental car he was driving and the bootprints he left in three abandoned houses: The weatherboard farmhouse. The ivy cottage. The stone bungalow. In each of them, one set of prints led in, one set led out.
Secrets That Refuse to Stay Buried
His disappearance tore apart the marriage of his parents, Rowena and Griff, and Ro left for Sydney. Now, five years later, she is back for the memorial, but still looking for answers, following whatever breadcrumbs she can. Sam had been working on a thesis about the relationship between the town and the mine, interviewing all the local inhabitants, trying to figure out if there was anything that could have been done to prevent it becoming a ghost town. He’d left behind his laptop and written notes, and Ro cannot stop reading and re-reading them, searching for clues or lies. And revisiting those houses.
One belonged to her cousin, Warren, dead by suicide; another to Ann-Marie, who now rents a place in town with her grown son Jacob; the third to Bernie Reece, who lives with his son, Noel, on a farm. Sam’s questions held up a mirror to all of them, and to all their families, forcing them to examine what they’d gained or lost. None of them liked what they saw. They still don’t. Every one of them had something to hide. They still do. But as the memorial nears, those secrets will come out, one by one, all the way to the unpredictable ending.
Nuanced, intelligent, told with elegant prose and vivid storytelling, Last One Out is an unforgettable novel about memory and family, guilt and penance, a book both heartbreaking and – against all the odds – filled with true grace. And if you haven’t read them, it’ll definitely send you back to Harper’s other books.
Start with The Dry.
About Jane Harper:
Jane Harper is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dry, Force of Nature, and The Lost Man. Jane previously worked as a print journalist in Australia and the UK and lives in Melbourne with her husband, daughter and son.
