Force of Nature: The Dry 2, starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk - Couverture souple

Jane Harper, the new Queen of Crime...Even more impressive than The Dry...Harper makes it look easy but she has to pace two narratives without giving too much away, creating an almost unbearable level of suspense...Nature is a hostile, unpredictable force in both of Harper's novels, but her brilliance lies in making it into a test of horribly fallible human nature (The Sunday Times)

Once again Harper leaves you gagging to know who did what. Once again there are plenty of suspects (Evening Standard)

With consummate skill, Harper alternates between Falk's investigation and an account of what happened to the five women on their hike, as they rapidly find that the natural world is out to get them and their relations with each other deteriorate . . . Harper has a fine gift for making her readers comfortable in inhospitable territory - psychological as well as physical (Jake Kerridge Daily Telegraph)

'The most exciting emerging novelist of the last 12 months...As gripping, atmospheric and ingeniously plotted as The Dry, it places Harper in the elevated company of the authors she most admires: Val McDermid, Gillian Flynn and Lee Child (Mail on Sunday)

Powerful, intriguing and recommended...Harper is wonderful at evoking fear and unease, and she draws a mesmeric picture of the terrifying Australian terrain (The Times)

Jane Harper brings a potent outsider's eye once again to the uncanniness of the Australian bush . . . Like The Dry, this is a deftly assembled and cleverly paced novel, the characters skillfully and nimbly drawn . . . It's stirring to see a writer racing out of the traps with such confidence and storytelling flair. (Alasdair Lees Independent)

Jane Harper is more from the Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt school of mystery: elegant, intelligent and not for the faint-hearted...As chapters swap between the tense outward-bound weekend (where self-hatred, fear and resentment jostle for position) and its subsequent investigation, Harper creates a claustrophobic page-turner that conjures up that other great Australian mystery, Joan Lindsay's Picnic At Hanging Rock (Emerald St)

Five women head out on a camping trip, but only four emerge, bruised and traumatised. What follows is a clever twist on a locked-room mystery, set in a forest as alien and hostile as anything in a fairy tale (Sunday Times)

This irresistible thriller is a perfect summer read - and a warning against bonding weekends with colleagues you don't like . . . (Mail on Sunday)

Jane Harper has high literary credentials - her debut novel, The Dry, one of the big hits of last year, matched critical acclaim with bestselling sales figures. This second novel is just as good...Landscape is a sinister presence in Harper's novels and here it takes on a powerfully disruptive, psychological force...Harper creates an atmosphere of stifling claustrophobia as the novel inexorably telescopes in...This is that rare thing, a whodunnit where the writing is as satisfying as the thrills (Metro)