Review: Force of Nature

Force of Nature by Jane Harper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Certainly not as strong as her other offerings, but an intriguing enough mystery I suppose.

I honestly thought I would like this more because the dense bush of a mountain range sounded a far more interesting setting to me than the dull dry drought of the other two Harper books I've read. But this fell a little flat sadly.

Plot: With a very thin excuse, Falk and his new partner, Carmen, are helping assist in a missing persons case. Alice went missing over the course of a four day team-building adventure in the bush and the longer they take to find her, the more they worry about finding her alive.

The link tying Falk and Carmen to this case is pretty stretched. They work in money crimes and Alice has some info they need, so they're invited to help out. Why they do more detecting than the detective actually on the case is beyond me.

We flit back and forth between the present investigation and the four days of the hike's events. Unfortunately this felt more gimmicky than clever - there are a lot of secrets that the group aren't telling the cops until after we read the relevant scene, but reading the scene makes you wonder why they bothered to hide things in the first place. It frustrated me that the explanations were so weak and pathetic, and that there really was no reasonable explanations for the behaviours of anyone in the group.

There was nothing particularly exciting in the events, either, so when they come to light there's no gasping, or gaping, or hand over mouth kind of reaction. It's more like, '...oh. Okay then.' Also super disappointed that despite the team being in the bush for four days there's virtually no sign of wildlife? Harper does a great job of setting the scene and making us feel that through-to-the-bone coldness, but I feel like the lack of animals was a huge oversight. One snake relevant to the plot does not do justice to Australian wildlife.

I'm also just not a huge fan of Falk, and none of the other characters were particularly enjoyable. Falk seems like an old, doddery kind of fella and the awkward, barely-there sexual tension between him and Carmen was cheap and pointless. The ladies from the hike are all pretty whiny and selfish, and it took me way too long to figure out who was who, and what each of their vices were. I just cared nothing for them. Add in the guilty bad parenting with another strained link back to our detective and I've almost entirely lost interest.

The mystery itself doesn't drive the story particularly fast, either - Alice is missing. Where could she be? And how does her disappearance relate to the two words Falk could make out from her voicemail - '... hurt her'? I mean that voicemail clue at the start of the novel was so fkn terrible. It was clearly part of a longer sentence so why he was so 'troubled' by it is beyond me. Repeating it throughout the entire novel as something ominous seemed completely pointless.

So yeah, I guess that's my biggest complaint with this book: so much of it was pointless. There's no real drive or fear or thrill, there's no action, no adventure, no token kangaroo or wombat even to spice things up. She does write atmosphere quite well but there just wasn't much of a thrilling story to keep this one alive as much as I wanted.

An enjoyable setting and an intriguing setup, but ultimately tainted by a mediocre story.

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