The Survivors: A Novel

"150 miles south of the Australian mainland is the island of Tasmania, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch merchant and explorer who landed there in 1642, although Aboriginal people had lived there for tens of thousands of years before. It’s a wild place, with the temperate rainforest of Savage River National Park so inaccessible that it’s possible extinct species may still roam. The Survivors , by one of my favourite crime writers, British/Australian crime novelist Jane Harper, is set in a small beach town on the island, where the wildness comes not from the forest but from the ocean, stretching thousands of miles down to Antarctica. Everyone in the town knows each other, except in summer when lots of backpackers pass through. The backdrop of the menacing ocean, where terrible tragedy struck more than a decade before, is what makes this such an unsettling read. You feel the aftereffects of that trauma, a father with dementia, the frustrations of small-town life. On top of all that, there’s a murder. As always with Jane Harper, the pace is slow and measured but the book is hard to put down."