The latest thriller from Jane Harper, the bestselling author of The Dry, opens on a familiar landscape: desolate rural Australia, a setting marked with discomfort and decay. In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town on the brink of ruin, a young man goes missing. Five years later, on the eve of his 21st birthday, the community comes together for their annual vigil. While his mother, Ro, has all but given up hope that her son Sam is alive, she’s still desperate for the answers that will allow her to say goodbye.
As in her other books, Harper makes good use of the environment, using the parched, arid farmlands to reinforce an atmosphere of isolation and abandonment. While the descriptions sometimes border on the commonplace – the paddocks, once green, now “brown and patchy, dotted in places by the odd sparse copse of sickly eucalyptus trees”, the “patchy lawn” outside houses half-abandoned – Harper captures the contemporary tensions troubling this well-worn archetype. Such as the nearby coalmine, a “dark stain” on Carralon Ridge and its inhabitants:
Monstrous and vast, it dwarfed the trees and buildings dotted around its perimeter. It had been carved out by layer after layer dug into the ground, oddly reminiscent of a terraced farm, but every level a variant shade of black. There were two distinct quarries, one more than twice the size of the other. At the bottom of each, a lake of water pooled murky and grey.
The mine is full of narrative possibilities – the workers who keep to themselves, strangers to the tight-knit community; its intrusions on the natural environment, creating rifts in the earth where bodies might disappear; the corporate leadership, trying to forcibly acquire the farmland for expansion. Community has been stamped out, first by drought and then by “progress”.
The mine, a looming threat over the town, might not be directly responsible for the violence at the heart of the novel, but Harper condemns it nonetheless, exposing the corporate greed of the takeover, where premium prices quickly drop to less than the bare minimum as the balance of power shifts. The people of Carralon Ridge are forced to leave their houses and memories behind with nothing to show for them, and no money to start afresh. Between the rejected coal scattered across the dry grass and the mistrust rippling through the community as neighbours wonder who will be the next to sell up and move out, Carralon Ridge is a tinderbox primed for ignition.
Murder, or the suspicion of it, is introduced by the absence of life rather than its brutal ending, and this slow, crawling tension is one of the aspects that make Harper’s novels distinct from those that follow more predictable paths. Early on, Sam’s disappearance could easily be put down to misadventure, if not for some unexplained footprints, or Ro’s certainty that her old friends are keeping secrets from her.
Ultimately, Last One Out is less about the dead than it is about the living, left suffocating in the aftermath of tragedy. After Sam’s disappearance, Ro moved away from Carralon Ridge, abandoning her husband, Griff, to his grief. The town doesn’t easily forgive her disappearance, and while they still show up every year, when she makes her annual pilgrimage back to remember her son, there’s a sense that they blame her for leaving. Her loss is layered through the novel, the physical loss of her son compounded by the psychological loss of belonging.
The more that Ro digs for her own answers, the more she exposes the town’s deep grief. Her best friend, Heather, is struggling to raise her own teenage boys who struggle to find somewhere to place their adolescent rage. Sylvie, the owner of the local pub, is unable to move on from her husband’s death years earlier. Griff works for the mine that has taken his home. Hope is a scarcity.
But as much as Harper captures the taut dynamics between this strained ensemble, the underlying mystery doesn’t have quite the same heft as her earlier books. Sam’s absence is felt heavily by his family, but Last One Out is drenched in so much despair overall that it’s hard to feel especially moved by this single loss. But while it lacks some of the momentum of Harper’s earlier work, Last One Out is a satisfying read nonetheless.
Last One Out by Jane Harper is out now in Australia (Macmillan, $34.99) and will be published in the UK and US in April 2026 (Macmillan)
