Like all of Jane Harper's book the description and feel of this book is actually quite superb You are drawn into the world of the characters and actually feel as if you are standing beside them as they fight their way through the dramas that are affecting them. This is a well crafted mystery that totally draws you into the small town of Evelyn Bay, Tasmania and i just love it when books are set in my own country There are some many nuances in th story that it takes on a twisted path as you try top solve what is really happening in this town with oh so many secrets Jane Harper is fast becoming a go to read for me as I have loved all four of her books.

The Survivors is the fourth novel by award-winning Australian author, Jane Harper. When Keiran Elliott returns to his small Tasmanian hometown of Evelyn Bay to help his parents pack up their house, not everyone is pleased to see him. While everybody knows what happened during the big storm, twelve years earlier, not all regard him with sympathy; blame radiates from certain eyes.

Mere hours after he and Mia and their baby arrive, though, a young woman is dead on the beach. The town is shocked at the loss of this sweet young woman: a temporary summer waitress and art student, she was well-liked. It soon becomes apparent that there are some parallels with the disappearance of a young girl during that fateful storm, with some of the same bystanders present in the town. The Evelyn Bay Online Community Hub is a hotbed of rumour and comment.

Over the next few days, as police from Hobart arrive to investigate, Keiran is not the only one whose thoughts go back to that awful time when his own brother and his best friend’s brother lost their lives. As well as the stress of his wandering, dementia-affected father and his frazzled mother, Keiran is being coerced by a friend into something he’s not quite comfortable with.

Harper easily evokes her setting: for anyone who has spent a summer in an Australian coastal town, this will feel familiar. The dialogue is exactly what one hears in such a place, and the characters are multi-faceted and believably flawed. Once again, Harper produces a brilliantly-plotted piece of Australian crime fiction, with red herrings and diversions that will keep the pages turning and the reader guessing right up to the final pages.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Macmillan Australia

4.5 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Survivors by Jane Harper, it was an addictive read.

The story location was set in Tasmania in an atmospheric coastal setting. The book portrays the tragic story of Kieran Elliott and how his life changed during a major storm twelve years ago, he still carries the guilt and it haunts him to this day.

Kieran has returned to his hometown along with this wife and three month old baby to help his mother and his ailing father who is suffering from dementia to move house. This is Kieran’s first time back in twelve years to Evelyn Bay and simultaneously there is a murder which puts the small community on edge.

As the police begin their investigations into the murder, emotions are running hot and old wounds are opened as suspicions fall on some of our characters.

This is a wonderfully written murder mystery about family, friendships and lies. The story weaves through Kieran’s past and how it relates to the present, the characterisations are both strong and believable. This was a page turner for me and a read you can’t pass up!


I wish to thank NetGalley & Pan McMillan Australia for an advanced copy to read in exchange for an honest review

Wow!! I can totally see the ABC buying the rights to this book and making a mini series out of it.... Well I hope that's how this goes because I loved this!
This is the second book I've read by Jane Harper (first The Dry) and now Im officially a fan!!

My goodness Jane Harper you have done it again, I love, love your books, you always kept me guessing to the very end , an other brilliant Aussie author you all need to read.

She's done it again.   Jane Harper has fast become one of my favourite Australian authors.    Her fourth novel,  <b>The Survivors</b>, possibly rivalled her amazing debut novel The Dry - at least in my opinion.    I raved about that one and feel similarly enthusiastic about this one.     I found The Survivors to be tremendously addictive.   With her realistic characters and authentic setting Jane Harper has a way of  drawing her readers in.     The plots she comes up with are exceptionally good and even when I think I've figured out whodunnit, I invariably have not.    She sneakily threw in some red herrings so there were numerous possible culprits, but alas all my hunches were incorrect.  

Kieran and Mia have returned with their newborn baby to the small coastal town in Tasmanian where they grew up.    Twelve years earlier there had been a major storm  and they had each lost someone close to them.   Kieran particularly carries the burden of survivors guilt and his grief, though managed, remains just below the surface all those years down the track.   He feels responsible for his brothers death and can't help feeling his parents don't quite hide the fact they too blame him.    Certainly there are others in this community who openly blame him, so being home comes with mixed emotions.

On their first night back in the town there's a murder which sends shock waves through the whole community.    As the police begin their investigation insinuations are made,  rumours are spread, emotions are inflamed, and twelve year old wounds are re-opened.

The story blends the two major events in the towns recent history making readers question whether some elements could be related.   The prologue set the tone and Harper cleverly tricked me into believing I knew what was happening.     Towards the very end of the book, in the denouement, she set me straight with quite an ahhaa moment. 

Sincere thanks to Jane Harper for continuing to deliver on her already high standards, and hopefully she's hard at work writing novel number five.    Thanks too to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the opportunity of reading this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review which it was my absolute pleasure to provide.

4.5 stars on Goodreads.

Jane Harper has a way with words. She can describe a setting perfectly that you can almost smell the Tasmanian seaside. That in itself to me make this a great book. I love the story line, the characters are flawlessly written and the plot as always had me almost breathless.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for my honest opinions,

I really enjoyed this new novel by Jane Harper. It's a contemporary drama with mystery elements throughout, which I found fascinating. The plot was quite interesting and I really loved the characters.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this E-book to review via Netgalley.

Another well-crafted and beautifully set book by Jane Harper.

I’ve read all her works, and there is something incredibly atmospheric about her books. Suffocating is a word I’ve used multiple times to describe my feelings while reading a Harper novel. Suffocating dry heat (The Dry), the suffocating closeness of the bush (Force of Nature), a suffocating family (The Lost Man), however, The Survivors appears to be the outlier.

Instead of feeling suffocated, I felt cold. The cold of the water, the coldness of the characters’ relationships and interactions, and cold dread as a thread unraveled in my mind and then on the page. I finally guessed it correctly, so it’s Harper: 3, Erin: 1

While The Survivors did not evoke the same feelings in me as it’s predecessors, it’s still a very good read. Harper has once again woven a tight story, created a complex set of interwoven narratives, and developed a host of characters that could be your neighbours or the very people you’d expect to meet in a tiny coastal town in Tassie. 3.5 stars.

As ever, I’ve gotten through it too quickly and now have to suffer the long wait until the next one.

Thank you to Jane Harper, Pan Macmillan Australia, and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In her new novel Jane Harper has taken us away from the hot dry interior or wild rugged ranges of her previous books to a small coastal town on the southern coast of Tasmania. Evelyn Bay is the type of seaside town fondly remembered by many Australians for family summer holidays of endless hot, sunny days playing on a sandy beach beneath a perfectly blue sky. A town swamped by holidaymakers in summer that breathes a sigh of relief as autumn rolls in and the locals hunker down to wait out the off season.

Kieran and Mia have returned to Evelyn Bay, where they both grew up, to help Kieran's mother pack up the family house and move his father into a nursing home as his dementia worsens. To Kieran, nothing much seems to have changed in the town, but he can't help thinking back to the powerful storm twelves years ago that changed his life for ever as well as that of his family and friends. The day after they arrive Bronte, a young student working in the local bistro for the summer is found dead on the beach outside her home, raking up memories for the town of another young girl who disappeared without trace during that wild storm twelve years before.

As well as immersing us in atmospheric landscapes like that of Evelyn Bay with it's caves and statue called the Survivors on the cliffs overlooking a famous shipwreck, Jane Harper is so good at painting the relationships and frictions in small towns. The town has never allowed Kieran to forget the events that occurred during the storm and he still carries survivor's guilt over his role in the tragedy. But others in the town have hidden secrets about that day and as Detectives from Hobart start to investigate Bronte's death, the tension of the town rises and those secrets start to surface. There are many layers to the story with the local online community hub quickly becomes full of rumors and theories about who the killer might me. Quite a few red herrings are present in the unfolding of this tale and my theory on what happened was completely wrong as I discovered in the suspense filled ending.

Jane Harper has made a success of delivering Australian crime novels with distinct sense of place. She explores both the beauty and dangers of that place and the community that adapts to it. In her multi award winning debut The Dry, that place was country Victoria and a landscape that was set to combust, in her 2019 award winner The Lost Man, the setting was outback Queensland and the threats were heat and distance. In The Survivors, Harper once again changes location. Her latest book is set in a small coastal community in Tasmania, still traumatised by the death and destruction of a massive storm many years before.
Kieran has returned to the small town of Evelyn Bay with his wife Mia and their new baby to help his ageing parents prepare to move to Hobart. Kieran’s mother is moving his father into care due to his advancing dementia and they are packing up the house. Kieran himself is a survivor of the massive storm of twelve years before that took the lives of his brother and his brother’s business partner, both of whom dies when coming to rescue him. Kieran still struggles with the grief and blames himself for their deaths. Kieran connects with his three old friends who still live in town but before long they are all caught up in the murder of Bronte, a traveller who has been working in town as a waitress. As the investigation of that murder goes on, connections back to the events of the great storm and its aftermath start to emerge.
Harper showed in The Lost Man that a crime novel does not need to be built around the main investigators of a crime. As in that book, Kieran is not a detective but he is interested in finding out what happened and does a little bit of his own digging. And this makes the murder mystery secondary to Harper’s exploration of the community of Evelyn Bay, how it ticks and how it responds to tragedy. Again, similar to The Lost Man, the unwritten rules around how people are supposed to treat each other and what happens when they are either adhered to or broken for personal reasons underpin all of this action.
All of that said, however, The Survivors is still a great mystery story, with plenty of suspects and red herrings. Using Kieran’s lay-investigator point of view allows readers to put themselves in the position of trying to solve the murder before the police can, using the clues that Kieran gathers. And while there are obviously secrets to be uncovered, this does not feel like a clichéd town full of wrongdoers. And once again, Harper manages to deliver this with a really organic sense of place – the town, the beach, the caves, the famous shipwreck marked out by an eerie partly submerged monument and the ocean around – not only its beauty but the way in which it shapes the people who live there.
In The Survivors Jane Harper shows how to get Australian rural crime fiction (or any crime fiction) right. Once again she immerses readers in the middle of a regional community and uses the crime genre tropes to explore what makes that community function. In particular how the members of the community interacts and responds to the landscape in which it sits, how it shapes them and how the people respond to the types of tragedy that are always possible when living in that landscape. While the ending is a little abrupt, following as it does some explanatory exposition, the solution to all of the mysteries, tied as they are to trauma and guilt, is satisfying.

Kieran and his partner Mia have returned to his small coastal town to help his parents move, when the shocking muster of a young woman starts to dredge up long buried secrets.

This is such an awesome read. You get given just enough detail that you want to know more; then the next few chapters turn everything on its head
I really loved how guilty and grief was portrayed with such tract and deftness too.
Honestly though, I cannot recommend this book enough. Grab a copy, it’ll blow your socks off!

The Survivors is Jane Harper's fourth novel and it's yet another well realised, beautifully written literary thriller.

There are several things that I loved about this novel: the descriptions were incredible, it was very easy to picture the locations, the vibe of the place. The small seaside town of Evelyn Bay, Tasmania - a made-up location - was easy to imagine. The characterisations and the backstories were excellent, they added layer upon layer to the mystery, they took us on sidetracks, as the genre demands, but it was all smooth sailing as everything was plausible, nothing was amiss, I couldn't find any plot holes, always a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

For the plot, read the blurb.

With a fourth novel to her credit, Jane Harper has firmly established herself as one of the best writers of the mystery-thriller genre. Having read and enjoyed all her novels to date, it's fair to say that I'm a fan.

I received an ARC from Netgalley.

Jane Harper is a sensational writer, the way she can set up the atmosphere of her novel is what I love about her books the most, the descriptions of the places where her stories are set are so vivid you can almost taste it.

It was like that for The Dry, and The Lost Man with the descriptions of Outback Australia and now she takes us to a new place, remote, seaside Tasmania, making me feel the wind in my hair and taste the salt on my lips.

The desperation of this small Tasmanian town is felt through the words, and characters that flood her book. The modern day story was a typical run of the mill mystery, but the true depth of this novel was in the past story, and the character of Kieran as he comes back home to face both his past and his present.

As a fan of Jane Harper I drunk this in, staying up late into the night as she had me hooked up until the final page and in true Harper style ends the novel abruptly leaving you asking for more.

I don't know what it is about Jane Harper's books but they never quite do it for me. This is my third Harper book and while it was enjoyable I forgot it five minutes after I finished it. The only thing that stayed with me was the incredibly described scenery. Harper has a gift for setting the scene. The beach, the sea, the winding dirt roads on a cool summers night. Honestly, I'd read her just for that. However, Harper's books are predominately character driven and this was no exception. I had to write all of them down as I was reading because there were so many of them thrown at me right at the start. Each character has a purpose so it's important to keep track. Unfortunately, all of the characters were approximately the same age, bar a few, and they all blended together so working out the 'culprit' was impossible until the end.
And that was it. The end. It was so abrupt I would have appreciated an epilogue. If you like a slow burn character driven mystery you'll love this. I'm in the middle of the road with this one.

Jane Harper does it again!! I love her atmospheric writing style, I’m always totally sucked in. The Survivors had me hook, line and sinker!

Haunted by tragedy, Kieran returns home to a small Australian coastal town, with his wife and baby to help out his parents, when a body of a young woman is found on the beach. Could this be connected to a girl who went missing during a storm 12 years ago?

This is an emotional, compelling, richly plotted mystery. I loved it.
While the storyline wasn’t original, it really didn’t matter as it was written so brilliantly. And let’s be honest, I’d read anything Jane Harper writes, even her grocery list.

Fair warning: in the last eight months I’ve become obsessed with Jane Harper’s books and practically inhaled her first three books and then got very excited when I found out her fourth book was being released this year. (This was great, because I didn’t have to wait too long!) And… there may have been a lot of happy dancing around my apartment when I was approved for a review copy from Netgalley.

The Survivors is, like all of Harper’s previous books, a murder mystery set in a small Australian town. Set in the small coastal Tasmanian town of Beauty, Kieran Elliott has returned home with his wife and baby to help his parents move from his childhood home, all the while haunted by a terrible tragedy in his past. Still struggling with the guilt from his childhood, Kieran begins to question what he knows about the events that took place and the things he thought to be true when the body of young woman washes up on the beach.

Of all of Harper’s books, The Survivors most mirrors The Dry – in terms of story elements and plot. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because there is a lot to love in The Dry and looking back on my reading experience, they were the same things I really liked in her newest release.

We follow the story through Kieran’s perspective; it’s his thoughts, experiences and inner-monologue that guides us through each event as he begins to piece together things that happened in his past and how they relate to what’s happening in his childhood town. A bit like Aaron Falk, Kieran is something of an outcast in his hometown, the tragedy from his childhood that impacted on his own family and others following him into adulthood. He’s uneasy there, and thus, when faced with the questions surrounding the death of the girl on the beach, driven to find out what happened.

Despite Kieran being the protagonist, in Harper’s books the biggest character is always the setting – the place where we find ourselves. Tasmania is a big a sharp detour from the harsh conditions of the Australian outback, but they’re no less perilous. Harper has recreated the coastal town, and the hazards of living there (particularly during storms), and as a reader you’re always cognisant that the town is as much a character as any of the people in the story.

The many characters surrounding Kieran are well-fleshed out, from his young family whom he has rebuilt his life with, to his parents – his father suffering from dementia and his mother caught up in her own grief over the past and the present – and all of the people in the town, be they friends, former friends or people who look on him with distrust. Each one is a fully-realised person within the narrative and as everyone’s secrets are revealed, it does become a guessing game as to who might have been responsible for this current mystery.

I was hooked from page one and I couldn’t put the book down, and I can’t wait for the release later in September so I can order a copy and reread it.

Having read Jane Harper's last three novels, I was greatly anticipating THE SURVIVORS. Set in a beachside town in Tasmania, Kieran and his wife Mia take their newborn back to their hometown. A tragedy that occurred many years ago, and has damaged Kieran's reputation, will re-emerge in light of a new tragedy.

Harper has an astonishing ability to write a page turner that doesn't feel trite or contrived. However, I felt that this was well-trodden territory for her, formulaic almost in its reveal. Characters seem to all talk the same and are drawn just well enough. We don't really get to know any of them, although the inevitable domestic drama does allow us some insight into motivation and thought.

I will definitely be reading Harper's next, I just hope it's a slight changed from what has come before.

Thanks to NetGalley, Pan MacMillan and Jane Harper for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I've read a few of Jane's other novels and enjoyed them all, but I think that The Survivors is my new favourite of hers.
Kieran and his girlfriend Mia, along with their baby girl Audrey, reside in Sydney, but they return to the Tasmanian town of Evelyn Bay to help Kieran's parents with an upcoming house move after his father is diagnosed with dementia.
Both Kieran and Mia grew up in Evelyn Bay, but twelve years ago, a massive storm swept through the town, and Kieran's brother Finn, along with his best friend Toby, both drowned.
Kieran has carried the guilt of that day with him all these years as he feels responsible that they were out on the water that day.
Another local teenager, Gabby, who was Mia's best friend at the time, disappeared on the same day and was never seen again.
Not long after the couple return to help with the move, a young woman named Bronte is found washed up on shore in suspicious circumstances.
As her death is investigated, it brings back a lot of memories from the past, and some long-kept secrets finally come to light.
I thought this was an excellent book, highly addictive, and really had me turning the pages. I was suspecting most of the characters at various stages in the book, but was way off!
I love the way Jane describes the coastal town, she has a way of making you feel as though you are there in the setting.
I would've loved for the story to have an epilogue, just to tie in everything and answer those few questions I still had in my mind.
I'd highly recommend this novel.

Harper specialises in capturing the languid, moody undercurrents of small town minutia. Her previous novels – particularly 'The Dry' and 'The Lost Man' – were almost exquisite in their ordinariness, with menace lurking beneath her slow and steady stride.

In this outing, however, the pace feels more like a plod. Characters wait in the wings to be fully formed while reflections on relationships ring hollow.

Still Harper has created a crafty whodunnit, and though some red herrings rankled there is still enough here to make it a compellingly companionable read.