Force of Nature by Jane Harper

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Strong Language


Five women reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking along a muddy track.
Only four come out on the other side.

The hike through the rugged Giralang Ranges is meant to take the office colleagues out of their air-conditioned comfort zone and encourage teamwork and resilience. At least, that's what the corporate retreat website advertises.

Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker, Alice Russell. Because Alice knew secrets, about the company she worked for and the people she worked with.

The four returning women tell Falk a tale of fear, violence and fractured trust during their days in the remote Australian bushland. And as Falk delves into the disappearance of Alice, he begins to suspect some dangers ran far deeper than anyone knew. 


After reading The Dry, I had big expectations for Force of Nature. I knew going in that it was going to be a bit different from The Dry, and I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about a completely different setting and set of characters.

Those things ended up being non-issues for me. What I ended up not liking were the stupid choices the women made out on the hike. There was a point when they could easily have found their way back to where they should have been, but instead overconfidence on the part of one person got in the way and they all ended up following her.

This kept me guessing but it also didn't seem to drop many clues. The story was told and gradually it revealed what happened. The details, of course were not pretty, and the relationships between the women, and the different secrets they each had were unraveled slowly.

“She was smiling in every photo, looked truly happy in none.”

Have you ever met someone who smiled all the time but never truly looked happy? It's in the eyes. That's what the women in this book were all like. None of them were very happy, and most of them were not all that likeable, but seeing the reasons for their own individual actions, and how their personal relationships and problems affected them on the hike was interesting.

The best part of this book was Falk himself. I very much enjoyed the parts where he examined his past with his father. His coworker was also a nice touch, and I liked that she was able to draw out the part of Falk that he kept hidden. She could see him for who he really was, despite the fact that he was hiding behind those walls. I was slightly disappointed that she was engaged to marry someone else.

I'm not sure if or when there will be another book in this series, but I'm enjoying it enough to read another one.