Last One Out by Jane Harper

Jane Harper’s debut The Dry is often credited as being in the vanguard of the Australian rural crime fiction wave. Since then, Harper has delivered a series of crime thrillers set in different parts of regional Australia including the Victorian High Country (Force of Nature), the Tasmanian coast (The Survivors) and the Queensland outback (The Lost Man). Her latest novel, Last One Out, is no exception, set in regional New South Wales. But Last One Out, possibly as the name suggests, is not about a thriving outback community with long held secrets. It is about a dying community where everyone has either left or is leaving (but, of course, with long held secrets).

Last One Out opens with Sam Crowley on his 21^st birthday, visiting three very different empty houses on the outskirts of the small rural town of Carralon Ridge. Readers soon learn that this was also the day that Sam disappeared and the action picks up five years later when Sam’s mother Ro returns to town for the anniversary of Sam’s disappearance. Harper then spends a lot of time with Ro, her husband Griff and daughter Della and their grief. She uses them to explore the way in which Sam’s disappearance, on top of the pressures on the town itself, tore their family apart. While Ro suspects foul play, it is only about two thirds of the way through Last One Out that it appears that she may be right and her fairly slow moving and amateur investigation gains some shape.

Last One Out is more than about the disappearance of one young man, it is about the slow death of a whole community. That death has been hastened by the nearby mine which runs 24 hours a day and is looking to expand. The mine owners have been buying up properties and those who sold out are seen as traitors. But many of those that remain do so due to misplaced nostalgia, an inability to contemplate change and guilt. Understanding this unravelling of the community and its impact on the people who remain is ultimately the key to all of the mysteries that Harper has posed, but it is also fairly dour and more than a little depressing.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this dive into life in a dying small rural town is the impact on the young people. Harper exposes an almost implicit passing on of intergenerational behaviours. But in reality it is probably more of a universal expression of the way teenagers react to being bored and isolated.

There is more than one crime in Last One Out, and these are eventually unravelled, albeit in a similar languid pace as the rest of the book. But the heat of the novel is this question: what killed this community? And in that respect Harper does not obfuscate or create any mystery. The coal mine – its noise, its dust, its trucks, its impact on the water table and its rapacious devouring of the landscape – is a constant looming presence throughout the narrative. So that, in the end, Last One Out is more of an elegy than a crime novel, a sobering reflection on some of the things we have lost (and continue to lose) in our pursuit of progress.

Last One Out by Jane Harper

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7.0/10