On a rainy day, I made a steaming cup of chamomile tea and grabbed a throw blanket, curled up on my dorm bunk, and dove into my new book. Then a freshman at Berklee, I swung by the Barnes & Noble in Boston’s Prudential Center and purchased her novel, glaring at the name on the cover that was nearly the size of the novel’s title: The Dry. Her name?Īfter some crying and a slight identity crisis, I decided to buy the book to see if this Jane Harper was more deserving of the name than I was. So, you can imagine how heartbroken I was when a brand new author debuted with a New York Times’ bestseller. To me, the name represented the novel I had spent so much time developing, as well as someone I wanted to become. I became attached to Jane Harper the way someone becomes attached to a list of baby names. This decision included spending my evenings in my small-town coffee shop, wearing non-prescription glasses, and giving myself a pseudonym because, for some reason, Haley Griffin didn’t have a ring to it. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past and why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend’s crime.Ī WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS CRIME THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEARĪn Amazon.When I was fifteen, I was set on becoming an author. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke’s death threatens to unearth.

As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. I just can’t understand how someone like him could do something like that.Īmid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn’t rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. ‘P acked with sneaky moves and teasing possibilities that keep the reader guessing… The Dry is a breathless page-turner’ Janet Maslin, New York Times ‘A riveting murder mystery and a beautifully wrought picture of a rural community under extreme pressure’ Mail on Sunday Thriller of the Week

Book the dry by jane harper