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Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Finished: The Dry (Harper) Another page turner! The Dry is about Aaron Falk, a detective in the fraud division in Melbourne, Australia, who goes back to his small hometown for the first time since a scandal twenty years before, to attend the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke Hadler. Drought conditions have driven people to even killing their own cattle that they can't keep watered, and the unchallenged theory is that a drought distraught Luke took the life of his young wife, and his young son, before killing himself. Luke's father thinks otherwise, though, and he has reached out to Aaron to come home and figure out what happened. The motherless Aaron and his own father had left Kiewarra twenty years before, run out of town more like it, when Ellie Deacon, the girl sixteen year old Aaron was in love with, was found drowned in the river. Many people thought she'd taken her own life, especially since they suspected she was physically abused by her father, but having found a note in a pair of her jeans that had the date of her death written on it, and the name "Falk", the entire town turned against Aaron and assumed he'd killed her. Luke offered up Aaron a false alibi, since they were both off separately just fishing and whatnot. Luke didn't want Aaron to be pinned with something he didn't do. Nonetheless, the town was relentless in it's harassment of both Aaron and his father, so they picked up stakes and left the family farm. When Aaron comes back twenty years later, many of the town folks remember him and still shun him. Ellie's father and cousin are particularly brutal bullies, but Aaron is determined to stay and see what happened to Luke, his wife and little Billy. Their 13 month old baby girl had been left unharmed in her crib, so it was all a big mystery. Of course, most of the town had already judged the dead Luke and determined that financial and farm troubles had lead him to the murder/suicide. With the help of the local police chief, Aaron uncovers what looks to be motives in a few different people who may have wanted Luke dead, but each one becomes a dead end. In the meantime, he's also meeting up with Gretchen, the fourth in their quartet of teenage friends, and trying to figure out what really happened to Ellie...one week after they shared their first kiss at the secret "rock" tree by the river. When Aaron and the chief finally stop looking at who might have a grudge against Luke and look at his wife, Karen, they hit the jackpot. Karen had uncovered $50,000 of mishandled funds at the elementary school, which had received the much need money grant from a charitable society. The principal, who had moved to town in recent years, had a gambling problem and owed some nasty men some money. When confronted by Karen, the school bookkeeper, he decided that it would be better to kill her and Luke and blame it on Luke than to face the consequences of admitting he'd stolen the money. He had thought little Billy would be at his own home on a play date with his own seven year old daughter, but Karen had canceled that at the last minute. So, when Billy saw his principal shoot his own mother, he ran to his room to hide, but the principal tracked him down, found his hiding spot and killed him. :-( That part of the book is very sad and awful, but the majority of the book doesn't focus on the gruesome details. Instead, we delve into Aaron, Luke, Ellie, and Gretchen's past...and into Aaron and Gretchen's current lives. We also find out that it was the evil Mal Deacon himself, who killed his own daughter Ellie, when he tracked her down to the river preparing to run away like her own mother had five years before and he killed her. Twenty years later, Aaron found her backpack tucked in the crevice of their secret rock tree and in it her diary where she explained that her father had become more and more abusive so she was going to leave town...even though she'd just found someone she really cared for....Aaron. This was a really good book, and I believe the author's first. I will definitely be reading her next book which apparently also has Aaron Falk in it, solving another murder mystery in Australia! :-)

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