Fallout

July 15, 2013
At the start of Disher's fast-paced sixth Wyatt novel (after Port Vila Blues), the Australian career criminal slipping away from his police woman lover, Liz Redding, to sell some stolen jewelry, but the exchange goes sour and Wyatt barely escapes the police. When he crosses paths with nephew Raymond, likewise a criminal of some note, Wyatt reluctantly decides to team with Raymond, who has a well-founded reputation for unreliability. Hot-headed Raymond is also prone to poor decisions, as shown by his choice to provoke the violent ire of Steer, a hard man who already has a grudge against Wyatt. What should have been a quick score rapidly evolves into a struggle for survival. Disher's prose is as clean and straightforward as ever, though the plot amounts to a series of digressions as old history and human fallibility derail grand schemes, despite the best efforts of his coolly professional protagonist. Fans should note that the seventh entry, Wyatt, is already available in the U.S.

July 15, 2013
Peerless Aussie thief Wyatt teams up with his not-so-peerless nephew Ray for a high-stakes caper that's got failure written all over it. Despite the different outfits he wears for each job, the Victoria Police know that the same man is responsible for all the shotgun-fueled bank jobs they've been investigating. What they don't know is that the bush bandit is Raymond Wyatt, the estranged nephew of the crook who's been a thorn in the constabulary's side for a dog's years. Not content to stay with a life of honest stickups, Ray's been smooth-talked by gambler Brian Vallance and his much younger girlfriend, Allie Roder, into going shares on an independent, illegal salvage operation that promises to net the partners millions. Ray plans to raise the money he needs to buy in by pulling an art heist on commission from a crooked lawyer, and since he needs a partner, he naturally thinks of his uncle, who's capped his latest jewel robbery (Port Vila Blues, 2012) by drugging Sgt. Liz Redding, the cop who chased him all the way to his bedroom, and running out on her. But before the two Wyatts go after those lightly guarded paintings, Ray unwisely accepts another offer of 15,000 to break murderous holdup man Tony Steer out of jail. He plans to keep this little commission secret from his uncle, but an explosion of violence brings it to Wyatt's attention anyway. Nor does the theft of those paintings come off quite as Ray expects. There's a little too much of the younger Wyatt, who's nowhere near as compelling as his uncle, but Disher continues to show an impressive knack for planning capers that go like clockwork but then come to grief anyway.

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