I picked up this book to see how Jane Harper handles climate change in a first novel. Australian federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to his rural hometown from Melbourne to consult on the triple homicide of his best friend from school and his family. The case appears to be a murder-suicide by a farmer under stress from a long-term drought; there are lots of those desperate farmers in Kiewarra, and friend Luke appears to have snapped. But Falk also has a murder from his past to come to terms with, and two investigations—one official and one personal—move forward in tandem. Harper deftly illustrates how the drought strains the bonds of community—such as they were—and reshapes what should have been a familiar landscape. When he interviews the elementary school principal, for example, Falk is taken aback by the school kids’ drawings of brown crops, dying cattle, and unhappy parents. The Kiewarra River, a landmark and a key setting for the story, is gone altogether; that absence at the center of the town is a metonymy for a global human crisis.