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Jane Harper offers readers a vivid tour of Australia's lonely places. Her debut, THE DRY, was set in a parched farming community anxiously waiting for wildfire to break out. Her second novel, FORCE OF NATURE, took us into a cold and tangled forest where it was all too easy for workmates on a teambuilding outing to become hopelessly lost. Her third novel, though it doesn't feature her previous protagonist, Aaron Falk, continues the pattern of being rooted in a vivid landscape. This time, it's the flat, dusty outback of Queensland where neighbors can live a four-hour drive apart and the unforgiving sun is deadly. The disturbing opening scene sets the stage: A body lies beside a gravestone out in the middle of nowhere. Tracks in the gritty red dust circle around the hundred-year-old monument, a record of the dead man's attempt to shelter in its meager shade from the brutal sun.
Cameron Bright was one of three brothers who inherited a large cattle ranch from a violently abusive father. Nobody expected him to be the one who would lose his head – and his life – abandoning his truck just days before Christmas in a place where help is hundreds of miles away, even if he had been uncharacteristically upset about something. He was the successful one, running a profitable herd, befriending townsfolk, and even painting a picture of the lonely stockman's grave that has garnered some critical renown.
In contrast, his older brother Nathan is a divorced outcast, shunned by the residents of the only town within a day's drive. He lives alone on a barren piece of land, isolated from everyone except for occasional visits from his teenage son, ostracized because he once passed by his ex-wife's father when he needed roadside help. In this harsh landscape, that's a mortal sin. The other brother, much younger than the others, is resentful and feckless, angry that his plans for the ranch haven't been taken seriously. The family, joined by a hired hand who is practically a family member and two backpackers from England who were hired to work on the ranch but have proven mostly useless, have gathered with Cameron's mother, wife, and two daughters at the homestead to celebrate Christmas. Instead, it's a funeral that brings them together – and drives them apart.
Nathan can't help but wonder what exactly led his level-headed businessman of a brother to die under the brutal sun beside the stockman's gravestone. Was his supposed suicide connected to a scandal from the past, when the teenaged Cameron was falsely accused of rape by a passing backpacker? Or is there an explanation that's closer to home?
THE LOST MAN is a slow-burning skillfully plotted story about the long shadow cast by generations of masculine violence, playing out in a vividly-depicted landscape where stories of a dead stockman can generate rumors long after his lonely burial. This is probably Jane Harper's strongest book yet, and that's saying something.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, January 2019
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