Exiles by Jane Harper

Publisher's Synopsis

At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother having vanished into the crowds.

A year on, Kim Gillespie's absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.

Aaron Falk, federal investigator, is joining the celebrations. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems. As hidden truths slowly emerge, Falk faces the darkest of questions.

My Review of Exiles by Jane Harper

Aaron Falk, the AFP officer who came to our notice in The Dry is back for a third time in The moody, character driven mystery titled Exiles. This time we’re in the small (fictional) South Australian wine producing town of Marralee where Falk is visiting friends and family on the anniversary of the disappearance of Kim Gillespie.

“Kim Gillespie had been part of the extended Raco family for close to twenty-five years, Falk knew. Since that long-ago autumn afternoon when she’d first ridden her bike past the Racos’ house, teenage ponytail swinging, until the night last year when she’d disappeared under the bright festival lights. The christening had been immediately cancelled after Kim went missing. It had taken the Raco family a full twelve months to reschedule.”

It was at the previous year’s Marralee Valley Food and Wine Festival that Kim went missing, leaving her infant daughter in her pram and, seemingly, just walking away. The recollections of the festival-goers are sketchy and not particularly helpful but, a year down the track, the family is hopeful they can jog someone’s memory to try to warm up the cold trail. 

Falk is in town to play his part as godfather in the christening of his friends Greg and Rita Raco’s son. While there he mingles closely with the family and friends of the Racos all of whom have lived in and around Marralee for most of their lives. Over the days we meet and gain a great deal of information about each of the characters. 

We do so in such a way that you sort of don’t realise that what’s actually happening is that a picture is being constructed giving you vital details about the night in question. Meanwhile, it feels as though you’re being invited into the household so that, suddenly, you’ve got a stake in each of the family and friend’s lives.

Before long we discover that there’s another, older mystery hanging over the town. In the course of digging into the events from 12 months previously, Falk begins to come across a few anomalies related to an older hit and run death that was never solved. This also happens to hold a personal interest for Falk with links to a newly renewed friendship. He had met Gemma Tozer 16 months earlier one night in Melbourne and thought there was a spark of romance between them. She had lost her husband, Dean, to a hit and run accident in Marralee 5 years earlier and had backed off before things were able to progress. Now Falk is in town and, in reconnecting with Gemma, has also started picking at the threads of the hit and run case too.

This is an interesting story because, although this is essentially a mystery story with two unsolved cases involved, the focus is very much centered on the family drama and the way everyone is coping. Falk isn’t there as an investigator and doesn’t overtly run any type of official investigation. It’s more a case of him picking up scraps of information from each of the people he interacts with and begins to put anomalies together. It’s a very interesting challenge as a reader, trying to work out what’s important and what’s not.

Unsurprisingly, with so many characters having been introduced, I was all over the place in trying to solve the crimes that had been committed. But then, I was so immersed in Marralee, Falk’s promising, yet still in its infancy, relationship and the way in which the locals resolved to get on with their lives, solving the mysteries kind of lost its ranking in terms of importance. Anyone who appreciates a well-constructed murder mystery novel set in a thriving small town that is richly described will appreciate Exiles.