The Lost Man is a character-driven mystery that keeps you turning the pages even though there isn’t an obvious threat of a killer on the loose and the piling up of bodies you often find in this genre.

There are a raft of family secrets, including stories about Cam – was he such a great guy as everyone seems to suggest? But how does Nathan ask the difficult questions without causing more upset? In a way, he is just as much a lost man as his brother Cam, but the death brings him back to his family and leads him to re-evaluate his life and facts he’d taken for granted. We get Nathan’s back-story, his difficult relationship with his father-in-law, his acrimonious divorce, the reason why he keeps to himself on his farm and never comes to town. There are Cam and Ilse’s young daughters and the English backpacking couple who help out where needed. There’s also Cam’s wife Ilse, a former barmaid and onetime squeeze of Nathan’s with whom he finds hard to be alone. We meet the characters who could reveal more: his still spritely mother, Liz, and Uncle Harry, the longtime farm help and family retainer. Nathan slowly pieces together what was going on in Cam’s life, moving back to the family farm with his sixteen-year-old son, Xander recently home for Christmas, and now it seems for a family funeral. The family log book where everyone notes their whereabouts for the day says he would be elsewhere on the property, meeting Bub to fix a repeater mast, an appointment he never kept. What was Cam doing here at the old stockman’s grave, miles from anywhere and his car nowhere in sight? They all know it’s madness to go any distance without your vehicle and its stock of water, food and petrol reserves, enough to sustain you until rescue. His farm borders that of his family, run by his brothers, Bub and the now deceased Cameron. The story begins with the arrival of Nathan, loner of the Bright family, at the site of his brother’s dead body.

Jane harper the lost man