Jane Harper's books in order: a complete guide

Jane Harper’s final book in the Aaron Falk series, which can also be read as a standalone novel, is characteristically packed full of mystery and dark secrets, set in the depths of rural Australia. Aaron Falk investigates a local community after a mother disappears from a busy festival, leaving her baby alone in the pram. As he looks into the case, long-held secrets and resentments come to the fore, revealing that perhaps the community is not as close as it seems. But Falk must tread carefully if he is to expose these fractures and get to the truth. This is an unputdownable thriller – and Jane Harper at her very best. 

Set in the small farming community of Kiewarra during the worst drought in a century, Aaron Falk reluctantly returns to his hometown for the funeral of childhood friend Luke Hadler, who has been brutally slain along with two of his family members. While Falk is hesitant to confront the townspeople who rejected him twenty years earlier, the circumstances around the family’s death feel suspicious. But as he digs deeper, his own secrets and those of the town as a whole begin to resurface, as old wounds bleed into new ones. Now adapted into a film, The Dry expertly teases the reader and forces us to jump to the wrong conclusions. 

Force of Nature follows Aaron Falk for a second time. On this occasion, five women embark on a hike through a rugged landscape on a team-building exercise, but only four return. Cue Aaron Falk. Alice - the missing bushwalker - is the whistleblower in his latest case, and so Falk has a particular interest in finding her. But the surviving women have other ideas. Spanning both the present day, and delving into the backstories of the investigation’s key players, Jane Harper expertly deploys chapter cliffhangers and narrative misdirection to keep readers turning the pages. 

In the middle of the scorching Australian outback lies the corpse of Cameron - one of three brothers who farm in the red desert. He is found among the small shadow cast by a dead stockman’s gravestone in what seems like a desperate attempt to seek shade. His death throws the Bright family’s quiet existence into grief and anguish as they try to unpick what really happened. Did he choose to walk to his death? Or is there a suspect hidden among the isolation of the outback? This haunting family mystery, set in an unimaginably hostile landscape, seeks to answer the simple question - why did Cameron Bright die?

When the murder of a young art student threatens the cocooned safety of Evelyn Bay on the Tasmanian coast, secrets are revealed. Kieran Elliott has come back to visit his family home to help his mother Verity, and his father Brian who suffers from dementia, move house. But his visit resurfaces the guilt that still haunts him from a fateful day in his past. And then, when a body is discovered on the beach and a murder investigation follows, Kieran must confront the questions that have never washed away.