Port Vila Blues by Garry Disher

Publisher's 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.

My Review 

Unlike the other Wyatt books, the final objective of Port Vila Blues is not a major heist. In actual fact, the story begins with a successful burglary that earns him a cool $50,000 plus an unexpected bonus in the form of a striking Tiffany brooch. But it's the unexpected acquisition of that brooch that is the catalyst for all of Wyatt's problems. When you steal jewellery you have to convert it to cash somehow and this involves a fence - a third party. The fence has to find an ultimate buyer for the jewellery, so the word has to go out and it's when word gets out about the brooch that the fun really begins.

The brooch is distinctive, very valuable and was stolen by a highly organised group of thieves known as the Magnetic Drill Gang only a few months ago. News that it has resurfaced so soon gets back to the men who were responsible for the original robbery and they immediately assume that there has been some sort of skimming going on along their convoluted line of accomplices, fences and couriers. Not wanting to risk the sweet run of success that they had been enjoying, the Magnetic Drill Gang members decide that they should eliminate the threat - Wyatt.

As others have found out in the past, this is a task that is easier said than done and after they've had their go, it's Wyatt's turn.

Port Vila Blues is full of descriptions of well-organised robberies carried out by dispassionate crooks, but they're crooks other than Wyatt, a significant difference. The prime motivation behind Wyatt's actions is revenge, something that is quite foreign to him, but he treats it with exactly the same hard-edged single-mindedness as he would any other job.

While the pacing of the action is by no stretch of the imagination slow, there is a lot going in various side-plots that are developed simultaneously in order to establish a solid background. More time is devoted to the process in this book compared to the earlier Wyatt books. The result is that we see less of Wyatt's creative brilliance, the factor that I see as the major drawcard to the series.

Because the focus is largely taken off Wyatt, particularly when it comes to the robberies that take place throughout the book, we are introduced to a whole new range of criminals. Largely, the ethics remain the same with a sprinkling of low-life characters mixed in with the more professional criminals. Disher barely bothers to give us a minimum of information about these characters apart from the bare essential details that explain to us that they are fairly ruthless people to whom life means very little. But when it comes to an action-based plot like this one, there really isn't much more that I would want to know about these guys anyway and it keeps the storyline tight and focused.

Starting in Sydney and then moving to Melbourne before a brief hideout in Hobart and on to a finale in Vanuatu, the action never really stops and the locations fairly race by. 

Port Vila Blues is a hardboiled story distinguished with all the cold-blooded violence that one would expect when dealing with hardened criminals intent on protecting themselves. Is there such a thing as honour among thieves? Not in this case.