Let’s be honest – corporate team building combined with hiking and camping? It’s enough to drive anyone to murder. Add the personality mixes of the group of women on the retreat and the domineering attitude of the missing woman, Alice, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Falk from Harper’s previous novel is back because Alice has been involved in a financial case he has been working, and it’s hard to tell if her disappearance is related to his case, due to other conflicts in her life or if she got lost in the woods and left the group by her own fault.
In the previous Falk novel, he confronted his demons and his past as he was drawn into a case in his hometown involving his childhood best friend. While there is a bit more of Falk re-looking his past in this one, it is caused by a sense of regret and loss about his father’s death and their relationship. Falk’s father was an avid hiker, so being in hiking country opens up some wounds Falk didn’t realize were quite so close to the surface.
The rest of the novel is focused on the mystery of what happened to Alice on her corporate hiking adventure. Alice has been the insider for Falk and his partner’s most recent, very high pressure case, so they are just as interested to find out what happened to Alice as the search party and hopefully get their hands on any files she might have for them. As the stories of the three day retreat emerge, however, it becomes harder and harder to tell if Alice’s disappearance is related to their case or not.
Harper flashes back between scenes from the hiking trip from the perspective of the five women on the women’s party, and the search/investigation following Alice’s disappearance. Harper does a great job of creating back story, showing how quickly the hiking party turn on each other (how very Lord of the Flies), and creating legitimate motives for everyone on that party to have had issues with Alice – is she missing because she was overly confident in her abilities, a nefarious corporate plot or an entirely unrelated incident of rage?
It was really the perfect read for me when I picked this up after struggling through some novels with pacing issues – a tightly plotted mystery with good character building, enough suspects to not have an obvious answer, and interesting detectives that don’t take over the narrative! Such simple ingredients and yet so hard to get right! I enjoyed The Dry but this one is even better, and I definitely hope for more Falk novels.
