Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Force of Nature by Jane Harper

Force of Nature by Jane Harper (Flatiron Books, 2018) is the second mystery featuring Australian Federal Agent Aaron Falk. Falk is still recovering from his injuries incurred in his debut adventure (The Dry, 2017) when he’s notified that a potential witness in an extensive corporate money-laundering investigation he’s been conducting has disappeared. Alice Russell was on a corporate-mandated team-building exercise in the Australian wilderness with some of the company executives Falk expected her to implicate and disappeared on the second day.

Five women from different parts of the company and at different levels of responsibility enter the dense forest with a map, compass, flashlight, and other supplies. Only four of them emerge days later, all with injuries of some kind and all telling slightly different stories. They do agree that Alice was a disagreeable companion and not at all helpful when the group realized they took a wrong turn while trying to reach the second night’s campsite.

The employees on the team-building trek include a senior vice-president and a clerk from the filing department and mid-level managers, so all have completely different perspectives on the organization and different reasons for obscuring their individual contributions to the disappearance. The character of each woman is sketched carefully and credibly, which is one of the features of this novel that makes it so readable. The plot reminds me strongly of Picnic at Hanging Rock, an early film from Peter Weir in which students on a school picnic disappear.

While Falk is trying to elicit meaningful information from them to figure out what happened to his witness, his bosses are still leaning on him to produce contracts and other records that document the money-laundering trail through the company. He does manage to meet their expectations, just not in the way he thought he would. Falk is a thoughtful, sympathetic character and one that I will be happy to continue to read about. A complex, layered story with strong characterization and an overwhelming sense of place.

·         Hardcover: 336 pages

·         Publisher: Flatiron Books; First Edition (February 6, 2018)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1250105633

·         ISBN-13: 978-1250105639

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.