Force of Nature by Jane Harper
Is Alice here? Did she make it? Is she safe? In the chaos, in the night, it was impossible to say which of the four had asked after Alice’s welfare. Later, when everything got worse, each would insist it had been them.
Five women reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking along the muddy track. Only four come out the other side. The hike through the rugged landscape is meant to take the office colleagues out of their air-conditioned comfort zone and teach resilience and team building. At least that is what the corporate retreat website advertises.
Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a particularly keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing bushwalker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case – and Alice knew secrets. About the company she worked for and the people she worked with.
GUIDE
THEMES
A woman goes missing on a corporate retreat.
SETTING
Set in Australia.
SERIES
Book 2 in the Aaron Falk series which is better read in order.
Review
Force of Nature is the second book in the Aaron Falk series by Australian author Jane Harper who has become one of my favourite authors. The setting for this book is the opposite of the previous one as we were in the middle of a drought and this time we are heading into the Giralang Ranges where it never seems to stop raining. The plot for this story centres on five women who go on a team building retreat but one of them goes missing. The missing woman, Alice Russell, was also helping Falk with a financial investigation into her company and it seems he may have been the last person to hear from her as she sent him a garbled message that included the words “hurt her” in it.
Falk heads into the Ranges to investigate but they are hindered by the fact that each of the other women gives a slightly different account of what happened and there are flashbacks scattered throughout that take us back to the beginning of the trip. It seems Alice was an unpleasant woman who did not get on with any of her colleagues and any one of them had a motive to harm her. As the retreat progressed, the tension within the group escalated to the point of violence. As Falk pieces the clues together, he can’t help feeling a sense of guilt that he played a part in Alice’s disappearance by putting her in danger.
The Giralang Ranges is a very atmospheric setting for this novel as the history of Martin Kovac, a serial killer, still haunts the area and it adds an air of overlying menace. The author is very adept at bringing the surroundings to life and you really feel you are part of the wilderness with its driving rain and howling winds. The women on the retreat are all unpleasant in some way, including Alice, so it makes it hard to sympathise with any of them but this is the whole point as Harper shows us how complex people can really be. Having said that, I really like Falk’s new partner, Carmen, and there were definitely some sparks of attraction there so it is a pity she is marrying someone else.
