Last One Out
by Jane Harper
In this standalone novel, Rowena Crowley has returned to the rural Australian town where, five years ago, her son Sam disappeared on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. He was expected to be home for supper that day, followed by a pub evening with two of his longtime buddies — but he never showed up.
His last remaining traces are the rental car he was driving and the bootprints he left in three abandoned houses. Long searches and investigation by police, family, and neighbours failed to find any clues to what happened.
The trauma of that event has blown apart Ro’s marriage to her husband Griff. She moved her medical practice to Sydney, while Griff is still working as a firefighter in the town, living in their family home. But each year, on the anniversary of Sam’s disappearance, they have gathered with their daughter and a few neighbours to mark and acknowledge their loss.
Carralon Ridge is a dying community. For several years, a mining company’s open-pit coal mine has been encroaching on the town. Early on, the company offered significant prices for residents’ land, and quite a few accepted the offers and moved away, leaving empty buildings and businesses behind. Other residents have stubbornly refused to sell, wanting to hold onto land that has been in their family for generations. But now properties are being expropriated anyway, at far reduced prices.
For his university thesis, Sam had been examining how the town was coping with these changes, interviewing residents’ reactions to the infringements on their way of life. He was trying to figure out if there was anything could have prevented the community from becoming a ghost town. Did his investigations have anything to do with his disappearance?
This novel, like all of Harper’s books, is highly character-driven. The story is not so much about what happened to Sam (although that is ultimately answered) but about the ways his family and community cope with the aftermath. In particular, it’s about how Ro comes to grips with the loss of her son, her marriage and her community. The past affects the present, but the ways it does so are not fixed; people and emotions continue to change.
I highly reommend this book. And if you haven’t read Harper’s other books yet, go back and read them too.
Jane Harper was born in 1980 in Manchester, England. She moved to Australia with her family at age eight, then returned to the UK with her family as a teenager. She studied English and History at the University of Kent in Canterbury. On graduating, she worked as a newspaper journalist in the UK for a number of years, continuing her journalism career in Australia after moving back in 2008.
In 2014, she enrolled in a 12-week online fiction writing course, which gave her the motivation to write the first draft of a novel. That novel then won a regional unpublished novel prize, which led to acquiring an agent and ultimately winning publishing contracts in Australia, the UK, and the US. The Dry, which was finally published in 2016, has won numerous international awards, has sold over a million copies worldwide, and was turned into an award-winning film in 2020 starring Eric Bana.
Each of Harper’s subsequent books — Force of Nature (2017), The Lost Man (2018), The Survivors (2020) and Exile (2022) — has also become a bestseller. Last One Out (2025) is her sixth novel.
She lives in Melbourne with her husband and their two children.