Title : Exiles
Author : Jane Harper
Narrators : Stephen Shanahan
Genre : Mystery
Listening Length : 12 hours 25 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jane Harper is a dependable author. Her books, which are situated in Australia, are generally very well written murder mysteries and have as their protagonist AFP policeman Aaron Falk.

So, when I saw her new book Exiles in the library, I picked it up without a thought, Unfortunately, unlike her previous amazing work, the first book of the Falk series – The Dry, and the second – Force of Nature, Exiles is a very, very slow moving novel. There’s a whole lot of nothingness in the book. The audiobook is about 12 hours long and really for the most part of this 12 hours, nothing much happens. 

The mystery begins from page one. The book actually has two murders in it. The main one is the presumed murder of Kim Gillespie, who was related to the Raco family, and has gone missing when she came back to Marralee to visit them from Adelaide. The second murder is of local accountant Dean Tozer. A hit and run cause Tozer to drown in the reservoir, and the car and driver are not found.

Aaron has traveled down to Marralee for the christening of his godson, good friend Greg Raco’s son Henry. Marralee is a small town, know for it’s wine and cheese and the annual Marralee Valley festival. Charlie, Greg’s brother, runs a vineyard in Marralee and used to be married to Kim. While in Marilee Aaron gets embroiled in the investigation into Kim’s disappearance.

It’s an intriguing case, and you’d think it’d be an eventful chase to find the perpetrator of the crime. But all the author actually does is build up descriptions, of the people involved, the community, the murdered woman, her friends and families, and their inter-personal relationships. So, it’s a whole lot of little nuanced events, which kind of build the bigger picture. 

The pace is glacial. The first 10 hours of this book are tedious and filled with repetitive conversations between different people about what could have happened to Kim. The events for the mystery, actually, start happening in the very last two hours of the book, and then there are a few unexpected twists and turns. But they come too late, me thinks. I have lost hope by this point. Also there are too many meaningless segways, and conversations, which bog down the actual story.

So, I was disappointed with Exiles. It is not a page-turner. To be fair, I did finish it but most of the time I was either listening to it driving or cooking or out on a walk. If in fact, I had been actually reading it, like actually sitting down in a chair and spending time reading the book, I would have given it up unfinished. 

Yes, it’s a decent book. As a mystery though, I would not recommend it – too much talking and too little action. This book needed to be shorter, tighter, less meandering and better edited. I will say that the narrator was fabulous and made it so much more interesting than it was.