Port Vila Blues Garry Disher 1996

Dustjacket synopsis:
"Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart.

"It's the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch -- and perhaps the girl -- that brings him undone. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation.

"But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules -- even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home.

"port Vila Blues is Wyatt's fifth heist. It's faster than ever, racing towards the inevitable confrontation on a clifftop above the deceptively calm waters of Port Vila Bay."

Quotes:
"In a murky world where the cops are robbers, old-style crim Wyatt positively shines. Clear taut writing - not a word wasted." - Marele Day
"...tough, violent, relentless and thoroughly convincing" - Stuart Coupe

First Paragraph

Carlyle Street, Double Bay, 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the air cleana cnd cool. Behind closed doors in the big houses set back far from the street, people were beginning to stir, brewing coffe or standing dazed under showers. Wyatt imagined the smell of the cofee, the sound of the water gurgling in the pipes.

But not at 29 Carlyle Street. According to Jardine's briefing notes, the house would be empty for the next few days. It was the home of Cassandra Wintergreen, MP, Labor member for the seat of Broughton, currently in Dili on a fact-finding mission. Champagne Marxist and ALP head-kicker from way back,' Jardine had scrawled in his covering note. That meant nothing to Wyatt. He'd never voted. If he read the newspapers at all it was with an eye for a possible heist, not news about political tussles. His only interest in Wintergreen lay on the fact that she had about $50,000 in a floor safe in her bedroom: a kickback, according to Jardine, from a grateful developer who'd asked her to intervene in a planning dispute regarding access to a strip of shops he was building in her electorate.

Wyatt continued his surveillance. Whenever he staked out a place he noticed everything, no matter how trivial, knowing that something insignificant one day can be crucial the next; noticing in stages, first the general picture, then the finer details; noticing routes out, and obstacles like a rubbish bin or a crack in a footpath that could bring an escape undone.

From the Allen and Unwin paperback edition, 1995.

Note:
This is number 5 in the Wyatt series of novels.

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Last modified: November 16, 2006.