A family has been brutally killed on their farm outside the small Australian country town of Kiewarra. It hasn't rained for two years, farms are failing and tensions in the community are running unbearably high. It seems that Luke Hadler reached snapping point, killed his wife and child and then committed suicide.

When policeman Aaron Falk returns to his hometown for his old friend's funeral he wants to get away again as soon as possible. He certainly doesn't want to be reminded of the secret he and Luke shared twenty years earlier. But as he's unwillingly drawn into the investigation into the Hadler deaths, the past keeps getting in the way. Questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, and Falk must face what's hidden in his own past to help him solve the secrets of the present.

10/10: Falk and Raco confront the killer, and the threat of tragedy.

Crime Down Under showcases some of the best crime fiction from contemporary Australia.
Jane Harper is a journalist who moved from the UK to Australia in 2008. She lives in Melbourne and currently writes for the Herald Sun. She won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015, and The Dry is her first novel. It was named the Australian Book Industry Association's Book of the Year, and the Australian Independent Bookseller 2017 Indie Book of the Year.

Read by Richard Goulding

Abridged and produced by Sara Davies.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2017. Show less