Kill Shot by Garry DishKill Shot (Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 242 pp, 9781925773224) is Disher’s ninth Wyatt thriller. Wyatt is a distinctive character in Australian crime fiction, and one that reflects Disher’s deep knowledge of the genre in its Australian context, harking back to a long tradition in nineteenth-century Australian crime fiction of zero-detection novels peopled by everyman/woman characters (rather than brilliant Sherlockian detectives and evil genius antagonists). Wyatt might be a supremely effective master thief, but one of his most important traits is his ability to change, adapt, and camouflage himself as an ordinary man. His experience, honed instincts, and quietude make of the world a living text that he reads with incredible insight. Wyatt’s observations of the men and women he shadows, and the worlds they inhabit, provide one of the great pleasures of reading the Wyatt novels. There is the minimalist, descriptive adroitness familiar to quality crime noir, for example, when Wyatt describes an old pilot as a ‘squat, broad man with a square, overheated face, yellowing teeth and white hair springing from his skull …’ But there is also the deeper reading of characters in extremis as they learn something new about themselves in Wyatt’s presence, such as an early target for a theft who is a blusterer: ‘You didn’t engage with them. It only worsened until they felt ridiculous. Then they’d go to some other extreme to counter that impression, and it would go on until someone got hurt.’

With the plot of Kill Shot focused on Wyatt relieving a Newcastle-based Ponzi-schemer of his getaway stash, and because the narrative shifts from Wyatt’s perspective to those of the novel’s variously invested characters, there is also room for some social commentary on contemporary Australian life, especially in the context of the banking royal commission. Wyatt’s target, the corporate-schemer Tremayne, assuages his anxieties about the potential for a fraud conviction by convincing himself that he can ‘outwait the Probity Commission. They were notoriously timid and he’d probably get no more than a rap over the knuckles. He couldn’t blame them. The Federal Government strips thirty-eight million dollars out of their budget and expects them to shake a big stick at corporate malfeasance?’

Wyatt’s extreme caution, his cool observation, and his understanding of human behaviour position him as both hunter and hunted. On Wyatt’s tail are two worthy antagonists: an old-school policeman different from his arrogant, young colleagues because of his focus on relationships-based policing and detection rather than modern surveillance, and an ex-military security company owner who intends to relieve Wyatt of any loot. Wyatt is made vulnerable because the source of his information is a prisoner, and the conduit for this information is the prisoner’s daughter who Wyatt is developing feelings for. The novel’s terrific sense of mounting suspense is predicated upon Wyatt’s increasingly dangerous position as he moves closer to his target. Beautifully written, with pitch-perfect dialogue delivered by well-drawn characters, Kill Shot is Garry Disher’s best Wyatt novel yet, and that is saying something.

The Scholar by Dervla McTierT

he Scholar (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 369 pp, 9781460754221), Perth-based Dervla McTiernan’s sequel to her widely acclaimed début, The Ruin, continues with her central character, Cormac Reilly, although the setting has changed from Dublin to Galway following his partner Emma Sweeney’s accepting of a research position with Darcy Therapeutics at Galway University. Cormac Reilly begins the novel as an outsider within the local detective branch, due to suspicions about his previous role. When Emma discovers the body of a young woman in the street outside the university late at night, she is understandably distraught. Her first reflex is to call Cormac, who later, together with his colleague Carrie O’Halloran, is first on the scene. Rather than handing the clearly malicious hit-and-run case to another detective, Reilly takes it on himself. The investigation leads quickly to Carline Darcy, granddaughter of Darcy Therapeutics founder, John Darcy. Carline, a brilliant chemistry student, has a strained relationship with her grandfather. The Darcy name carries weight in Galway, particularly with Cormac’s boss, and he is ordered to steer clear of the family and the institution. Complicating Cormac’s refusal to do this is his partner Emma’s position within the company, and suspicions among his colleagues that he is unfairly protecting her from scrutiny.

In the hands of a lesser writer, The Scholar might have been merely another run-of-the-mill police procedural, and yet McTiernan’s depiction of the office politics in the local Garda station is brilliantly rendered. Her roving narrative point-of-view brings deep characterisation to each of the novel’s main players, releasing fragments of backstory that accrue and give a strong sense of each character, while using forensic, acute, deeply considered prose to raise doubts in the reader’s mind as the novel moves toward its satisfying conclusion. Cormac Reilly in particular is a brilliant character – understated, careful, humane, and clever – as is his overworked colleague Carrie O’Halloran. Galway is evocatively described, with its dim streets and turbid river, a fitting setting for a story that successfully plumbs the depths of the human heart vis-à-vis tropes of ambition, resentment, loss, and trauma. The Scholar is a thoughtful, clever, well-crafted novel that suggests great things to come for its author.

Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox
Gone by Midnight (Bantam, $32.99 pb, 376 pp, 9780143789154) is dual Ned Kelly Award-winning author Candice Fox’s sixth novel in as many years, alongside her prodigious output since 2015 with collaborator and international bestseller James Patterson, which includes three co-written novels and a novella. Gone by Midnight is the third novel in Fox’s Crimson Lake series. Set in the Cairns area of far-north Queensland, the series focuses on the investigations of ex-detective Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell. The novel begins with Conkaffey – still doing it tough after having been unfairly accused of abducting a young woman – trying to keep a low profile in a town where many assume his guilt. He and Pharrell are hired by the mother of a child who has gone missing from a local hotel. Her motivation for hiring Conkaffey relates to her distrust of the police and her belief that Ted will protect her from their inevitable interest in her. The disappearance of her son presents itself as something of a locked-room mystery. How does one boy securely locked in a room with three other boys go missing when the door hasn’t been accessed? Various suspects present themselves, although Conkaffey and Pharrell’s attempts to obtain a clean run at the case are stymied by the resentful and obstructive local plods, due in large part to their hatred of suspected paedophile Conkaffey and previously convicted murderer Pharrell. The novel is peopled by colourful rogues, none more than Amanda Pharrell herself. Spiky and terse, flamboyant and irreverent, she provides many laugh-out-loud moments.

Crime fiction is a broad church, and Gone by Midnight isn’t a novel that invests time on social verisimilitude or deep psychological exploration of its protagonists and their world, nor upon generating an aesthetic that mines the novel’s tropical setting – none of which will trouble Fox’s fans. Gone by Midnight hits terminal velocity halfway through page one and never slackens.