Into the Night

Falk tried to take a deep breath, but the air tasted warm and cloying in his mouth. His own naïveté taunted him like a flicker of madness. How could he have imagined that freshwater still ran by these farms as animals lay dead in the fields? How could he nod dumbly as the word drought was thrown around and never realize this river ran dry?

You're gonna want to keep a tall glass of cold water next to you when you read this one because this book is dry. No seriously, it takes place in the middle of a drought and you will be reminded of that at every opportunity. Felt like I had to spit out a mouthful of dust after finishing this one.

This book was kind of like a buy-one-get-one-free murder mystery. The protagonist, Aaron Falk, is trying to suss out the truth behind why his best friend murdered his own family before committing suicide seemingly out of the blue. But an old tragedy of a separate maybe-suicide twenty years earlier involving Falk and one of his high school friends also threatens to rear its head again. So the reader is kind of juggling back and forth between the more recent mystery as well as the older one, and trying to determine just how much they're related, if at all.

The characters were all fine, and both of the explanations/reveals were logical and didn't require any leaps of logic in my mind. However I was kind of thrown by how towards the end of the book the narration jumps to a third-person omniscient style, and scenes and thoughts that the protagonist had no way of knowing about or experiencing were just presented to the reader in blocks of italicized text. Like it was obvious when we jumped to an exposition, but they were interstitched between other paragraphs of prose of a scene that was happening in the present. Kind of like a flashback just for the reader at Falk's expense; it just broke my immersion for a bit.

Honestly the most memorable aspect I'll take away from this book was the setting. We're in some rural Australian farming town in the dead of summer right in the middle of a brutal drought (which becomes plot-relevant in the climax, which justifies all the mentions in my mind). And every now and then someone would throw out a line of dialogue that would remind me, "oh yeah, they probably all have really thick Australian accents." The whole theme on people keeping secrets and how that affects others around them was pretty well reinforced as well. Pro tip: don't keep secrets that will hurt others.