Force of Nature

I'm really glad I've started this series set in Australia. A good, tight mystery with tangled motives and interesting red herrings, it is set in one of those dreary team-building exercises in the wilderness, which of course goes wrong in devastating ways. Some of that wrongness has nothing to do with the wildness of the Australian bush, but instead the wildness of present-day teenage lives and the pressures of family loyalty. A nice peeling of the onion to get at the truth, and no artificial sweeteners.

The Dry by Jane Harper was my favorite book of 2017 and it walked away with an armload of awards for best novel. That made her next novel, Force of Nature one of the most anticipated books of 2018. She doesn’t disappoint. Force of Nature is a brilliant book that will once again garner Jane Harper critical notice and award consideration.

Five women walk into the wilderness on a corporate retreat. Three days later, four women walk out. Where Alice Russell is and what happened to her is the mystery. It turns out Alice is an informant working with the Federal Agent Aaron Falk to bring down the company for which she works. Did that have something to do with her disappearance? Falk and his partner Carmen Cooper are headed to the wilderness show more to find answers as well as an important piece of evidence Alice was supposed to turn over to them.

Harper is a master at setting mood and placing you in the setting of her novels. “Isolated terrain, where trees grew thick and dense on land that was reluctant to let anything escape.” Her descriptions convey both the wonder and the danger of the landscape which is as much a character in this book as any of the people.

Harper’s characters are sharply drawn and complex. The narrative jumps back and forth between the start of the hike on a Thursday and the following Sunday when the four women emerge from the woods. Spending time with the women and their complicated relationships alternates with Falk trying to unravel what happened after the fact because each woman has a slightly different version of events. Once the women become lost, tensions and disagreements escalate. Was Alice’s whistleblowing discovered? Or was there a more personal reason for her disappearance. Falk encounters many possible motives in his investigation, but will he be able to figure out what really happened to Alice?

Force of Nature is one of the most suspenseful novels you will find and destined to be one of the best books of 2018. Harper has cemented herself as must read on a par with Tana French and Karin Slaughter. Her writing pulls you so deeply into the setting and the story that it will haunt you long after you reach the final page. Last year I said I was going to put The Dry in the hands of everyone I ran into and make them read it. This year I’m going Clockwork Orange on them and strapping them into a chair while I read it to them. It’s great and no one who reads it will be disappointed. Highly recommended.

I was fortunate to receive a copy of this book from the publisher. show less

Harper has boldly changed the styles, pacing and structure for second outing of Aaron Falks and for me it worked well creating a slicker, more tense mystery than the Dry with more than a hint of a female Lord of the Flies.

Plot in a Nutshell
A corporate retreat goes badly wrong when only four of the five women in one group return. The story alternates between what happened over the days they were away and the relationships and tensions between the group and the investigation to find the missing women. Alice, the missing hiker is key to an ongoing investigation pulling Falks out from the city and into the wilderness.

Thoughts
I really enjoyed Harper’s debut novel, a traditional police procedural where she used the drought in Falks show more hometown to create a stifling backdrop to a small town crime. I was less sure about Falks himself who I struggled to warm to in the first novel.

For his second outing Harper has maintained her ability to create atmosphere through setting. Here a claustrophobic, overgrown, damp wilderness becomes a creepy character adding at times a sense of horror as much as mystery.

Whilst still exploring a little of Falks character, particularly via conversations with his partner we see less of him as a protagonist in this novel, in favour of developing the characters of the five female hikers through both the flashbacks to their interactions and their recollections as they speak with the police on their return. The mystery takes front and centre rather than the investigation. This allows us to see a lot more of the relationships between the group which really worked for me.

Ultimately this was great mystery story, for much of it I really was not sure what had happened and what the outcome was likely to be. There was a myriad of red herrings for the reader, and indeed the police to follow which meant it was an exciting read until the end. I look forward to what comes next! show less

An Excellently Crafted Book with a Somewhat Diluted Ending

One of the things that first drew me into Force of Nature was the way Harper characterized the Australian bush country – so dense and tangled that even if you were walking in a straight line, it could feel like you were walking in circles. Every sound, every glimpse of motion is lost in the shadows from the vegetation just a few feet away. Then add a cold wind and rain, and uncomfortable becomes punishing. So, when five women on a corporate retreat to the area lose some gear and then get lost, a bad situation turns much worse. It would have been tense even if the women were the best of friends, a well-oiled machine in the working world. But they weren’t and when the story show more starts, only four of them have returned from their hike.

Harper uses parallel timelines, one chronicling the women’s hike, the other telling of Australian Federal Police Agents Falk and Cooper’s actions when they are called in four days later. The tension mounts with both storylines reaching their respective climaxes at the end of the book. It’s a great technique and Harper uses it well. I liked Falk and Cooper as the co-investigators. Neither were simple stereotypes, although Faulk was a bit flat. And Harper avoided the cliché of making their story too romantic. As for the women’s story, they ‘took turns’ relating the events as they saw them, and these shifting points of view give the reader considerable insight into their lives and personalities. Again, a nice touch by the author.

The paucity of the women’s training and the complete absence of safety equipment was not believable, but the rest of the story creates enough tension that this fact is easily forgotten. The pacing is acceptable, although it is more the ‘slow burn’ of rivals in a desperate situation for most of the book. The action does increase markedly at the end. But what should have been the pinnacle of tension becomes diluted, as the twist in the last third of the book introduces not only new thoughts about what happened to the missing hiker, but the reasons as well. Shifting themes so dramatically made it feel like two stories, the second one clearly significant but not nearly as developed as the suspense in the first.

Overall, Force of Nature is excellently crafted, with palpable tension for most of the book. But with a new theme competing for the reader’s attention, the finale fizzles a bit. show less

I liked this second mystery in Harper's series about Australian detective Aaron Falk just as much as the first. This centers around a group of women who go on a forced team-building exercise for work where they do a 4 day hike in the Australian bushland. They have a map and compass but not much else - no phone service - and after making it to the first camp site (supplies are staged at each day's destination) they get horribly lost on day 2. They end up losing one of the women and the search for her is the mystery.

What I actually found most interesting about this book was the dynamic between the women on the team-building exercise. From the beginning, they failed miserably. The five women were from different levels of the company - show more from the president to a data-entry position. The whole point of these types of exercises is to level the playing field and see everyone's strengths outside the office, but the president of the company, Jill, insisted on making all final decisions and controlling everything even though she was by far the weakest link as far as outdoor knowledge and fitness was concerned. And the women couldn't leave their work drama behind them and band together. This was really odd to me - they were completely unsupportive of each other. The nature of my job leads our unit to be very close, even with those we wouldn't otherwise get along with, because we are repeatedly put in high pressure performance situations and also in physically demanding work. Basically, we do constant team-building. So in some ways I found it pretty unrealistic that these women didn't naturally become supportive of each other in the challenging environment, but it definitely made the events realistic so I guess it worked for the book.

Regardless of all that, I find Harper's mysteries interesting and very readable which is exactly what I want in a mystery. show less

Difficult to follow a great book like The Dry, but Force of Nature more than lived up to that, for me. Pacey, gripping thriller set in (fictional) Australian wilds. Five women head out on a team building trek, but only four make it back to the rendezvous point. Matching the story of the women chapter for chapter, the story of the two investigators from the police fraud office, who are working with the woman who disappeared. Having spent more than my fair share of time lost with a map somewhere a lot less difficult to navigate than Australia, for me Harper perfectly captured the panicky quality of a group trying to navigate unfamiliar terrain, both in terms of map and characters.
I also loved the black humour she found in a relatively show more dark story.
"Jill watched the backs of their heads and shifted her pack. She could feel the straps rubbing on her shoulders. The man in the shop had told her that they were made from special breathable material for added comfort. The memory of that conversation infused Jill with a sense of deep and lasting betrayal."
Recommended. show less

"Force Of Nature" takes place some months after the events in "The Dry". Aaron Falk is back working in Financial Crimes in Melbourne, tracking down contracts to make a money laundering case against a family firm. The firm has an "Executive Adventure" retreat in the mountains which involves a team of five men and a team of five women navigating through the bush over the course of a weekend. At the end of the weekend, only four of the women make it out. The missing woman is the contact Falke has been pressuring to steal copies of contracts for him. Falk and his partner go to investigate.

This is very cleverly told tale, moving along two timelines in parallel. The main timeline, the search for the missing woman and the investigation of the show more circumstance of her disappearance, is interspersed with the details of what happened in each day in the women's team as the hiked the trail.

Without ever making me feel like I was being cheated, Jane Harper fed me bits and pieces of information about the women on the hike that kept changing my assessment of them as individuals and of their relationships to each other. Naturally, I was also kept guessing about what happened to the missing woman. The resolution was satisfying and plausible.

Unlike in "The Dry", Falk is not the focal point of this investigation. We continue to learn more about him and he behaves in a way that is consistent with the man we met in "The Dry" but he is instrumental rather than central this time. I thought the book was stronger for that.

I liked the way this book presented women. It's quite rare to read crime books that pass the Bechdel Test of having at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. "Force Of Nature" is MAINLY about women talking to each other.

We see the power of the bond between mothers and daughters and between (twin) sisters and the conflicts that arise from hierarchy and dominance. These women are clearly drawn and very believable. The verbal fights and physical violence that these women get into are tough and harsh but still different from the same kind of conflicts between men. My impressions of the women kept shifting as I learned more about them and they emerged as individuals with very different views of the same events.

It seems to me that the title refers to two forces of nature: the power of the bush to threaten our well-being and trigger survival behaviours that conflict with how we present ourselves back in the city and the power of family to summon sacrifice and guilt as well as love.

The book also looks at the pressure the Internet puts young girls under and what they do to themselves and each other to deal with that pressure.

This is a good, page-turning, mystery that is made richer by strong characters behaving realistically in a difficult situation.

I liked Falk and enjoyed seeing his view of events. There was just enough development of him to build a basis for a great series here.

I listened to the audiobook version. Although it had the same narrator as "The Dry", it didn't work quite so well this time. Partly this was because it's a challenge to have a narrator do so many different women's voices and partly because the editing was a little sloppy with a couple of sections with repeated sentences of mispronounced words. It was still a comfortable listen but adding a second narrator for the second timeline would have made for a better listening experience. show less