LAST ONE OUT

Five years after their son disappeared from their tiny Australian hometown, an estranged couple uncover disturbing clues.

Rowena Crowley has been grieving her son, Sam, since he disappeared five years ago, and she returns once a year to her former home, where her estranged husband, Griff, still lives. The remote community of Carralon Ridge is contracting by the minute thanks to an aggressive mining company; covered in grit, it literally hums with the industrial sounds of the mine and emits the palpable dismay of its remaining inhabitants. Every year the community comes together to mark the memory of Sam, who disappeared on his 21st birthday, including his sister, Della; his childhood friends, Jacob and Darcy; and Sylvie, who still opens the town pub from time to time. But this year is different: Ro and Griff come across a dark stain—could it be blood?—and a lost key in an abandoned house and begin to wonder if they’ve found a critical clue to their son’s disappearance. Harper is an expert at creating deeply atmospheric crime novels. Here she turns it up a notch with a setting that’s downright stifling with its sense of creeping menace: “Ro…felt on edge. She had the strong sensation of being in a dream where everything appeared normal, but daring to scratch the surface would reveal it as somehow distressing and wrong.” Between the townspeople’s reluctance to address certain topics and the confounding hints in Sam’s old notebook, which Ro has been parsing and rereading since his disappearance, there’s not a lot of give to the story at first. But as folks prepare to gather for Sam’s memorial, cake and all, fissures in the insular town’s relationships—romantic, platonic, intergenerational—expand, giving way to newfound knowledge, and Ro and Griff are forced to confront the choices they made five years earlier as well as realize that someone they’ve known for decades may well be more dangerous than they knew.

Harper has her finger firmly on the relentless pulse of quiet menace in this small-town mystery.