JANE HARPER’s latest small-town-Australia mystery, Last One Out (Macmillan, £20), unfolds in a community undergoing the last rites. Carralon was once a thriving, self-reliant place, where neighbours looked after each other and happy children played footie and cricket in the sun. But it’s gradually been absorbed by a mining operation, noisy and dirty — and ruthless. Its inhabitants’ solidarity is fractured as some accept the inevitable and sell their homes, farms and businesses to the expanding corporation, while diehards damn them as traitors.