Sanctuary by Garry Disher

Publisher's Synopsis

Grace is a thief: a good one. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high-value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger-LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s a solitary life, always watchful, always moving. It’s not the life she wants.

Lying low after a run-in with an old associate, Grace walks into Erin Mandel’s rural antiques shop and sees a chance for something different. A normal job. A place to call home.

But someone is looking for Erin. And someone’s looking for Grace, too.

And they are both, in their own ways, very dangerous men.

My Review of Sanctuary by Garry Disher

As a young girl, Grace Latimer grew up in foster homes and developed a friendship with fellow foster kid Adam Garrett. The pair of them both developed a talent for theft as well as the ability to hide in plain sight, changing appearance to blend into their surroundings which made them very effective in performing their burgeoning talents.

They grew apart as they grew older, going their own ways leading busy lives of crime. But their paths crossed one final time when Adam accused Grace (at the time she went by the name Anita) of stealing his Jaeger-LeCoultres watch.

Years later and Grace is prowling through a Brisbane stamp exhibition hoping to pick up a few high-value pieces when she spots the once-familiar face of Adam. Panicked, she quickly exits the place and decides it’s time to move on from Brisbane and the entire state.

She eventually finds herself in South Australia and has landed in the small Adelaide Hills town of Battendorf. She walks into Mandel’s Collectibles, lured by the sign proclaiming Help Wanted and confident the specialist skills she’s picked up obtaining small valuables over the years will give her the credibility needed to convince Erin, the proprietor, that she can do the job. 

With Erin suffering from agoraphobia she asks Grace to take over the running of the store as well as visiting sale events such as deceased estate auctions and the like. It’s the kind of job that’s just tailor made for Grace. But Grace has always found it necessary to play it cautious. Her life of crime is long and there’s always someone out there who may recognise her from her past. The feeling of a shoe that’s about to drop hangs over her head.

Lurking in the background, there's a domestic violence aspect to the story - it's inferred in the title, after all. From an early description of a clearly disturbed guy running all types of cons and scams, there's an inevitability about his final goal. 

Meanwhile we get an understanding of Adam’s life and it appears his early education of petty theft has opened him up to paying off his debts to a far more devious crim who uses him as her operative. He’s involved in some serious scams that prey on the vulnerable, fleecing the unsuspecting marks for huge sums. His life is right on the edge.

It’s possible to find elements from a couple of Disher’s popular series within the pages of Sanctuary. Although nowhere near as edgy or hardboiled as the Wyatt series, it appears that Garry Disher has mined the world of the master thief and dipped back into the criminal underworld to come up with four modern day crooks. And then there’s a Challis-like police character, a cop nearing retirement who finds himself on Grace’s trail. He’s an unassuming sort of man but has a mind like a steel trap and is clearly nobody’s fool.  

Through Grace and Adam we understand that living in the world of burglary, cons, scams and grifts is a dangerous way to exist and requires full time vigilance for fear that the victims you’ve left behind don’t find you. Disher navigates this world with great skill and illustrates exactly how dangerous the life can be, no matter how many precautions are taken. 

His ability to immerse the reader in a location is once again on display with the Adelaide Hills and Barossa regions brought to life with great effortless descriptions. Even though the fictional Battendorf was the primary small town destination, my mind’s eye had it pegged for another (similarly named) quaint bustling town up there.

Sanctuary is a beautifully constructed story of suspense featuring sharply complex characters as well as descriptions of some devious scams. With numerous disparate threads at play, it’s all brought together to reach a tense conclusion. Perfectly paced and consistently entertaining, this is a story that flows effortlessly.