Excerpt from The Lost Man by Jane Harper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Have you looked?"

"No. I was told not to touch anything."

Nathan instantly disbelieved him. It was his tone, or perhaps the way the sheet lay at the top end. Sure enough, as he reached out, Bub made a noise in his throat.

"Don't, Nate. It's not good."

Bub had never been good at lying. Nathan withdrew his hand and stood. "What happened to him?"

"I don't know. Just what was said on the radio."

"Yeah, I missed a lot of it." Nathan didn't quite meet Bub's eye.

Bub shifted. "Thought you promised Mum you'd keep it on, mate."

Nathan didn't reply, and Bub didn't push it. Nathan looked back across the fence to his own land. He could see Xander, restless, in the passenger seat. They'd spent the past week moving along the southern boundary, working by day, camping by night. They had been on the brink of downing tools the previous evening when the air around had vibrated as a helicopter swooped overhead. A black bird against the indigo death throes of the day.

"Why is he flying so late?" Xander had said, squinting upward. Nathan hadn't answered. Night flying. A dangerous choice and an ominous sign. Something was wrong. They'd turned on the radio, but by then it was already too late.

Nathan looked now at Bub. "Look, I heard enough. Doesn't mean I understand it."

Bub's unshaven jaw twitched. Join the club. "I don't know what happened, mate," he said again.

"That's okay, tell me what you do know."

Nathan tried to tone down his impatience. He'd spoken to Bub on the radio briefly the previous evening, as dark fell, to say he would drive over at first light. He'd had a hundred more questions, but hadn't asked any of them. Not on an open frequency, where anyone who wanted to listen could tune in.

"When did Cam head out from home?" Nathan prompted when Bub seemed at a loss as to where to start.

"Morning the day before yesterday, Harry said. Around eight."

"So, Wednesday."

"Yeah, I guess. But I didn't see him 'cause I'd headed out myself on Tuesday."

"Where to?"

"Check a couple of those water bores way up in the north paddock. Plan was for me to camp up there, then drive over to Lehmann's Hill on Wednesday and meet Cam."

"What for?"

"Fix the repeater mast."

Well, so Cam could fix it, Nathan thought. Bub would mostly have been there to pass the spanner. And for safety in numbers. Lehmann's Hill was on the western edge of the property, a four-hour drive from home. If the repeater mast was out in that area, so was long-range radio contact.

"What went wrong?" Nathan said.

Bub was staring at the tarp. "I got there late. We were supposed to meet at around one but I got stuck on the way. Didn't get to Lehmann's until a couple of hours later."

Nathan waited.

"Cam wasn't there," Bub went on. "Wondered if he'd been and gone, but the mast was still out, so I thought probably not. Tried the radio, but he never came into range. So I waited a bit, then headed towards the track. Thinking I'd run into him."

"But you didn't."

"Nup. I kept trying the radio, but no sign of him." Bub frowned. "Drove for about an hour, but I still hadn't made the track, so I had to stop. Getting dark, you know?"

Under the brim of his hat, his eyes looked for reassurance, and Nathan nodded.

"Not much else you could do." It was true. The night was a perfect shroud of black out at Lehmann's Hill. Driving in the dark, it was only a question of whether the car would crash into a rock or a cow or roll off the road. And then Nathan would have had two brothers covered by tarp.

"But you were getting worried?" Nathan said, although he could guess the answer.

Bub shrugged. "Yeah and no. You know how it is."

"Yeah." Nathan did. They lived in a land of extremes in more ways than one. People were either completely fine, or very not. There was little middle ground. And Cam wasn't some tourist. He knew how to handle himself, and that meant he could well have been half an hour up the road, slowed down by the dark and out of range, but snug in his swag, with a cool beer from the fridge in his boot. Or he might not.

Excerpted from The Lost Man by Jane Harper. Copyright © 2019 by Jane Harper. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.