The Dry

The Dry is a crime novel by the Australian writer Jane Harper, published in 2016 and her debut. It is the first book in the Aaron Falk series, followed by Force of Nature and Exiles.

Falk is a federal police officer who left the farming town where he grew up twenty years earlier, after he and his father were driven out of it. He has no plans to go back, until his childhood friend Luke is found dead, along with Luke's wife and son, in what looks like a murder-suicide.

A note reaches Falk telling him that Luke lied and that he lied, and that he should be at the funeral, so he returns. In the middle of the worst drought the district has seen, he is drawn back into the place's secrets and the people he left behind, with the town treating Luke's death as settled while he does not.

Harper writes the book as a mystery set against the pressure a long drought puts on a farming community, and it was adapted into a film in 2021. It is a self-contained case within the series that follows it.