Jane Harper
Jane Harper is a British Australian author known for her crime novels, including The Dry, Force of Nature, and The Lost Man, all set in rural Australia.
Early life and education
Born in Manchester, England, Jane Harper moved to Australia with her family when she was eight. The family lived in the outer Melbourne suburb of Boronia for six years, when she acquired Australian citizenship.As a teen, she returned to the UK with her family and lived in Hampshire. She attended the University of Kent, where she studied English and history.
Career
After completing her degree, Harper gained an entry-level journalism qualification. Her first job was as a trainee at the Darlington & Stockton Times in County Durham, and she later became a senior news journalist at the Hull Daily Mail.In 2008, she returned to Australia to take up a reporting job at the Geelong Advertiser. In 2011, she joined the staff of the Herald Sun in Melbourne. After working as a print journalist for 13 years, her first novel, The Dry, was published in 2016.
''The Dry''
The Dry, Harper's first novel, is a thriller set in a fictional town five hours west of Melbourne. A federal agent, Aaron Falk, returns to his old hometown to attend the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke. Falk teams up with a local detective and tries to uncover the truth behind Luke's sudden mysterious death, only to find more questions than answers.''Force of Nature''
Harper's second thriller, Force of Nature, is set in the thickly forested mountains north-east of Melbourne, again featuring federal agent Aaron Falk. A group from a Melbourne tech company go on a retreat in the mountains, where Alice Russell, one of the women in the group, disappears while navigating the Mirror Falls trail. Falk had been investigating the company for financial irregularities, and the woman was his secret informer.''The Lost Man''
Harper's third murder mystery, The Lost Man, is set on a large cattle station in South West Queensland. The police find nothing in Cameron Bright's death from dehydration to suggest foul play, and the investigation is carried out informally by the dead man's elder brother Nathan.''The Survivors''
In Harper's fourth murder mystery, the death of a young woman in a Tasmanian coastal town unearths questions around events during a storm 12 years earlier, during which two men drowned and a girl disappeared.A TV series of the same name was made by Netflix in 2025.