It's spring in South Australia's Marralee Valley. It's vineyard country and the Wine Festival lights up the darkness with the lights of the rides and lights it up with merry confusion. Federal Agent Aaron Falk is in the area on vacation because his colleague Greg Raco and his wife Rita have chosen him as their baby's godfather. Charlie, Greg's brother, takes care of the family winery and participates in the event as a producer. But the festive atmosphere is cracked by a mystery that has remained unsolved: the disappearance of Kim Gillespie, who just during the previous year's festival abandoned her little girl, Zoe, just six months old, in the stroller, to disappear without a trace. Her husband, Rohan, doesn't believe it is possible that the woman left like this. And neither is Zara, Kim's daughter from Charlie sixteen years earlier.
Despite being in the area for a vacation, Falk can't help but heed his hound instincts. So what should be a break in the investigative routine becomes a map of trails to follow. As always when it comes to human beings, looks can be deceiving. And it takes a different point of view, a sharp and penetrating gaze, to recognize the truth.
"After this exile" (Bompiani, 2023, Euro 19, pp. 450. Also Ebook) represents the third return to the scene of federal agent Aaron Falk after the bestsellers "Who is without sin", from which the homonymous film starring Eric Bana was based, and "The force of nature". A return that the Australian writer Jane Harper builds like a great puzzle that the protagonists – and Falk above all – must put together to discover not only the truth behind the disappearance of Kim Gillespie, but also behind a mysterious death that occurred a few years earlier, always in conjunction with the Marralee Valley Festival.
As the puzzle is composed and the inhabitants of the small community of Marralee - all people linked by friendship, kinship, social solidarity - add details to what Falk already knows, it becomes increasingly clear that some pieces don't fit perfectly. Others are even missing. For the federal agent and for the reader it therefore becomes impossible not to ask new questions, not to probe new hypotheses in a crescendo of suspense that Jane Harper manages with consummate skill aided by a prose full of atmosphere but also of details, always fluid and enveloping. All factors that contribute to building a claustrophobic and subtly disturbing thriller despite the sunny splendor of Australia's vineyard-covered countryside.
A thriller that confirms once again that we can all commit extreme gestures if we don't fully evaluate the consequences of our actions and our choices. Especially those that appear insignificant to us at the moment.
