FORCE OF NATURE by Jane Harper

This was a bit of page turner, and reminded me yet again, how Australia continues to produce really good authors and great stories. This has everything  a top thriller should have - good plot, believable characters and narrative, enough to keep the excitement factor up, and some unexpected twists, with clues popped in during the story that you just never fully twig onto till the resolution.

I haven't read the author's first novel - The Dry, which I understand is better than this one. This seems to pick up where the first one ended with Federal Police Agent and his colleague Carmen Cooper now on the trail of some dodgy dealings in a local corporate business. Their whistle blower Alice Russell has gone missing in dense bush during a company team building exercise with four other women.

Falk and Cooper race to the scene and over a few days the mystery of Alice is revealed. A toxic work culture, limited outdoors experience, the four other women and their relationships with each other, Alice herself, the past history of the bush and terrain where the women were including it being the haunt of a now dead serial killer. And at the centre of it all the rugged and unforgiving Giralang ranges - dense bush, over grown tracks, rain, cold, wind - all the elements that like a piece of Gruyere cheese have the holes all lining up at the same time to create perfect crisis.

There is an air of doom, danger and despair hanging over the entire story, which kept me turning those pages. This is an easy intelligent read, and if this is the weakest of the author's three novels, I can't wait to read the others.