Weathering the storms of life in rural Australia

My daughter gave me a copy of the novel, The Dry by Jane Harper. It successfully achieves several things that one rarely sees in a novel: a captivating and clever murder mystery, wonderful prose, a story of people coming to terms with the trauma of their past, and a picture of life in a specific community: a small town in rural Australia suffering in a drought.
The novel was praised in a New York Times review.