FORCE OF NATURE by Jane Harper

A company team-building trek into the Australian bush goes horribly wrong, and only four of the original five women make it out.  The fifth woman, Alice, apparently struck out on her own after the party got lost and quarreled about what to do next.  A search party is launched into the wilderness, and the likelihood of Alice’s survival dwindles with each passing day.  Meanwhile, Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk and his partner, Carmen Cooper, have joined the effort, as they were depending on Alice to obtain incriminating documents from the company.  Two of the women in the group are sisters, Beth and Bree, and two of the women, Alice and Lauren, have troubled teenage daughters.  Jill, the fifth woman, is a member of the family who owns the company and may be implicated in the company’s transgressions.  I thought the subplot involving the daughters was an unnecessary distraction.  I would have preferred that the author had delved a little more deeply into the relationships between the women, particularly Lauren and Alice, who have known each other many years and are completely opposite in nature.  One thing I really liked about this book was the structure.  The narrative alternates between what is happening after the hike and an account of what happens to the women during the hike.  It’s very nifty, so that as the search for Alice is progressing, we are also discovering how the women got off course and how they reacted to their dilemma.  As for Agent Falk, one of the more telling scenes is one in which he explains to Carmen why he has an empty magazine rack.  She must be pretty good at her investigative job, because it takes her no time at all to deduce, from looking at Falk’s furniture arrangement, that he once had a live-in girlfriend.  Sometimes you can figure out more from what’s missing than from what is present.