The Survivors is from top Australian author Jane Harper, who scored a worldwide bestseller with The Dry in 2016. It won eight awards and was made into a film which broke Australian box-office records.
Her other two novels have been reviewed as a "slow-burn", and I found her fourth novel The Survivors has such a slow burn as to be nearly extinguished. It's rare for me to find boring characters, set in a boring place, and even the discovery of a young woman dead on the beach is nothing to get excited about. Well written yet extremely uninvolving, this was definitely hard to finish. A mystery without intrigue, the little explosion expected at the end of the slow burn never came.
Keiran and his wife Mia return to the small seaside town in Tasmania where they grew up, to help Keiran's mother pack up the family home and help deal with his father's dementia. Reuniting with old school friends is nice, until a local waitress temping for the summer is found washed up on the beach. This brings back memories of the vicious storm twelve years earlier when Keiran and his girlfriend Olivia were trapped in the seaside caves where the water was rising, and his brother and friend lost their lives when the rescue boat capsized. That same stormy night a young girl disappeared never to be found, perhaps washed out to sea.
With all that going on, you would hope to be drawn in to the characters, the local Tasmanian town, the unspoken secrets of what happened that night, but you would find a lot of talking, thinking, wondering - without much investigation or drama. The focus is on Keiran and his guilt over being the cause for the boat crash that night - I almost forgot after 300 pages that a murder had even taken place. Wow, this was boring.
I was excited to read this, her newest book. I expected a mystery, but what I found was the musings of a guilt-ridden man. The secrets revealed are dull, the identity of the murderer lacklustre. I did finish, but wonder who found this book of interest. One of the most disappointing books.
2020 / Tradeback / 375 pages
it's rare for you to find a novel so disappointing, Eden so I am really wary of this. I read her first book Dry this year. I found it good but with a major drawback that made me not love it as much as others have done.
Neeru