Force of Nature

by Jane Harper

When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the muddy path. But one of the women doesn't come out of the woods. And each of her companions tells a slightly different story about what happened. Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker. In an investigation that takes him deep into isolated forest, Falk discovers secrets lurking in the mountains, and a tangled web of personal and professional friendship, suspicion, and betrayal among the hikers. But did that lead to murder?

• ISBN10: 1250105633
• ISBN13: 9781250105639
• Publish Date: 6 February 2018 (first published 26 September 2017)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 10 November 2021
• Imprint: Flatiron Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[rohshey]

2.5
I knew it. I knew it! It was too good to be true. It was too much to ask from the writer who wrote one of the best, gripping mystery thrillers of 2017 without compromising on literary quality to repeat the same magic with her second book. I KNEW IT.

Oh well for what's it worth, Jane Harper is a very good story-teller, and while her debut novel The Dry was a book that helped restored my dying faith on the genre of mystery/thriller, this one wasn't as special as I hoped it to be. From an early stage I was hoping for a devastating twist that would smash all that had gone before to pieces, sadly it never came and the tale faded away into a rather unexciting conclusion. With The dry, the beauty was in the details, the imagery, the character development and of course the dialogue but with this book, it breaks my heart to say it failed to deliver on any of those front and because of its lacklustre narrative, soulless dialogue and stilted character development, it also failed to deliver the dynamic ending it needed. The big question of 'who did it' was dragged out to the end but the revelation wasn't a surprise, partly because the list of suspects was so short.

If you guys truly want to experience the real power of Jane Harper’s storytelling, please skip this one and give The Dry a try. It’ll absorb you immediately into its gritty Australian backdrop and will leave you for wanting more as the haunting story of who kill the Hadler family comes to it satisfying end.