Jane Harper Books in Order
Jane Harper has become one of the bestselling thriller writers in the world, her books based in a variety of rural or small town settings in Australia. Anyone who has read one of her titles can testify as to their qualities - plots as tight as drum, whodunnits that aren’t revealed to the last page, rich and detailed settings, and rounded, believable characters. Oh, and she’s just a terrific writer.
There are five books in total - three in the Aaron Falk series, and two standalones. You could read the Falk series in any order you wanted, but you’d be missing out on his development as a character and learning about his past. There are also a couple of familiar faces that continue to pop up and reference is made to old storylines. Really, it’d be silly not to stay with the series. I personally know how important it is to read books in a sequential order - nothing annoys me more than references to events in a previous book, no matter how fleeting they are.
So don’t worry if you’re a newcomer - I’ve taken the time to make a Jane Harper books in order list. There are five altogether - I’m going to list the Aaron Falk series first, then the standalones. Naturally, there’s only one place to start…………
The Dry (Aaron Falk Book 1) 2016
As well as meeting federal police investigator Aaron Falk for the first time, we are also introduced to an important aspect of Jane Harpers writing - the use of Australian settings. Here, it’s the rural drought ridden farming community of Kiewarra, where the description of the heat is so evocative that I had to keep a cold damp towel beside me as I was reading. This is Aaron Falk’s home town, and he’s back to attend the funeral of a childhood friend, who committed suicide after murdering his wife and child. But Falk is treated like a pariah by many in the community, after events that happened twenty years earlier. He’s asked to look into the murders, and the past and the present start to collide. This is also an excellent film of the same name starring Eric Bana as Falk.
Force of Nature (Aaron Falk Book 2) 2017
Most of the action in book two in the Falk series takes place in the Giralong ranges in Victoria, Harper now moving the action into the rugged Australian Bushland. BaileyTennants have sent their employees off on a corporate retreat, the men taking one trail, the women a separate one, and when they return they are one hiker short. This is where Falk gets involved, as the missing woman was a whistleblower in a money laundering case he was working on. This book is chockablock with misdirection and cliffhangers, peopled by rounded characters with believable motivations. Just like the previous book, the landscape plays an integral part in the story with the bushland vividly described as a disorientating and claustrophobic place, and you don’t know who is out there in the trees. Also read recently that Eric Bana is back and they’re currently making a movie of this, so will look forward to that.
Exiles (Aaron Falk Book 3) 2022
I recently read and reviewed ‘Exiles’, which Jane Harper has said is to be the last outing for Falk -
“Exiles is a kind of 300-page goodbye letter to Falk…I wanted to craft the whole thing around him and bring it to the kind of conclusion that I thought was really right.”
And what a fitting finale it is. In ‘Exiles’, Falk has travelled to South Australia, where he is attending the postponed christening of the son of his friend Greg Raco, who we met in ‘The Dry’. The christening had been postponed after the ex- partner of Gregs brother mysteriously vanished from a local food and wine festival, leaving her six week old daughter in a pram beside the Ferris wheel.
Falk gets pulled into this case, as well as that of a previous unsolved murder. The setting this time is a small town set in the lush wine country of South Australia. I found the setting so vivid this time that I think I could actually sit down and draw the locations on a map, so precise are Harper’s descriptions. With shifting motives, buried secrets being uncovered, this is a slow burning mystery with a really satisfying conclusion. I would say that there are a couple of references to ‘the dry’ in this book, so you’ll all the happier for having read it first. Aren’t you glad you came across my list?
Seemingly that’s it for Aaron Falk, and I feel it’s a fitting conclusion for an interesting character, without giving anything away. So that’s the Jane Harper books in order in relation to Aaron Falk, but it’s not the end - we have a couple of superb standalones to enjoy.
The Lost Man (2018)
The setting this time is Queensland, in the vast outback where cattle ranchers are often three hours drive away from their nearest neighbours. Cameron and Bub discover their other brother Nathan at the legendary ‘Stockmans’ grave. He died of dehydration and exposure to the elements, but what Cameron can’t understand is why his brother would leave his fully stocked car, 9km away. What follows is a tangled nest of family secrets and buried resentments, with a small cast of characters each with their own motivations and experiences. The sibling tensions shimmer with the heat. You can taste the dust and feel the crushing isolation in this book, with Harper at her descriptive best.
The Survivors (2020)
We’ve had a drought ridden town, bushland, lush wine country and isolated cattle stations, so why not a beachside community? And it’s on a Tasmanian beach at twilight where on the first page we see a young woman being drowned in the surf. Keiran Elliott is back visiting his parents, still haunted by the death of his brother and friend in boating tragedy, for which he feels culpable. The death of the young woman opens up festering wounds, and soon the community are turning on each other. Again, Harpers descriptions are so detailed that even revisiting the book for this blog post I found myself almost being able to describe the beach setting as if I’d been there - some of the locations are that clear to me. I think, just like ‘Exiles’, Harper excels in describing a tight knit community, how sleights are never forgotten and memories are long. This is another slow burner, with the tension ratcheted up to a crescendo. Another key element of Harpers writing is how she is able to make you feel for the characters, in this case Kieran, who carries a lot of guilt.
So there you have it. Those are the Jane Harper books in order - first you have the Aaron Falk series, then two stand-alones. In terms of publishing dates, it’s The Dry (2016) followed by Force of Nature (2017), The Lost Man (2018) The Survivors (2020) and then Exiles (2022).
The great thing about Harper is that she has delivered five books in seven years, all of the highest quality. If that continues to be her publishing rate, we have some happy reading years ahead of us.
I hope you enjoy the books as much as I did and if there is to be no more Falk, Jane Harper has shown she can deliver a superb thriller even without her star detective. Can’t wait to see where in Australia her next book is set.