Crosskill by Garry Disher

Publisher's Synopsis

Wyatt is broke - and angry. The Mesics took his money a year ago. It's time to get it back.

The Outfit has other plans. They want Wyatt dead. $40,000 is a small price to pay to make it happen.

For Wyatt the street has become an extremely dangerous place - too dangerous to move in on the Mesics yet. He needs a different break. A bargain the Outfit can't refuse.

But Wyatt must also manoeuvre cops on the take - and an Outfit lieutenant with a gun in her hand and revenge on her mind.

My Review 

Wyatt is a thief specialising in only 3 or 4 big heists a year, going to ground in between time and living off the proceeds for the rest of the year. At least, that's how it worked until around 12 months ago. Since then things have turned sour, jobs have not been paying off and the organised mob from Sydney, referred to simply as The Outfit, have put a contract out on him. He is also becoming obsessed with the thought of revenge on the Mesic family, a crime family who has $300,000 that he feels is rightfully his. After all, he stole it fair and square. He plans to steal it back.

But Wyatt's sick and tired of having to constantly dodge the attempts to kill him all the time as people come to try to collect the bounty on his head. It has become impossible to organize a decent heist with the distraction it causes, never knowing whether the man he recruits for the job is more interested in selling Wyatt out than the task at hand.

So he travels to Sydney to deal with the problem head on. In a few chapters that are very reminiscent of plot from The Outfit by Richard Stark, Wyatt decides to hit the Sydney Outfit where it hurts most, in their hip pocket. His aim is to convince them that it's just not worth the effort financially to keep pursuing him. He makes a convincing argument and sweetens the deal by offering to help them take over the Mesic family's business, thus killing two birds with one stone.

The main game then takes place back in Melbourne with Wyatt planning to hit the Mesic family with the aim for Wyatt and his partner to get into the heavily fortified Mesic compound, subdue the family and crack the safe that is reportedly full of cash. Easy.

To add a little bit of variety to the story, Wyatt teams up with a trusted colleague in Sydney named Jardine. I'm loosely using the word "trusted" here because in Wyatt's world trust doesn't run particularly deeply, but the man has always remained loyal and efficient and this is good enough for Wyatt. It's unusual for Wyatt to work with someone he respects, he usually tends to put up with fellow crooks as a necessary evil, but Jardine adds another dimension to the Wyatt persona as he prompts a rarely seen trait - emotion.

The big drawcard to the Wyatt series is that Wyatt is a man of action and makes his decisions quickly and assuredly, carrying them out without needless hesitation. He is also completely impassive, devoid of sentiment or emotion. The result is a story that simply flies along, stating a goal (the planned heist) and then going ahead and acting on the plan. It's tough, occasionally heartless and Wyatt comes across as a little inhuman but it's also very compelling reading.

Crosskill maintains the cold economy of description that distinguishes the entire series and is just as hardbitten and mean. All characters are totally uncompromising and life means very little, particularly when money is involved.

A consistent feature of the series is the careful plotting that Disher undertakes, setting up a major plan calculating risks and adjusting for them with fallback schemes and plans, then introducing unexpected problems for Wyatt to overcome. Crosskill is nicely set up with this kind of scheme and there are any number of shady criminals, bent cops and crooks all converging on the Mesic family ensuring that just about anything can happen in the end.

So, for the 4th time Wyatt embarks on a high stakes mission knowingly entering the lion's den, but this time the payoff he's hoping to walk away with is his life.