Heist (Robert Schofield, Allen & Unwin

Opening with a daring robbery at a Kalgoorlie gold mine, Heist is an action novel that doesn’t really live up to its potential. Its cagey hero Gareth Ford is on duty when armed robbers burst in and steal eight 20-kilogram gold bars. The robbers take Ford with them, but is he a hostage or the inside man on a multi-million-dollar heist? Ford evades his captors in a nice action sequence in the desert, but when he tries to turn himself in he finds out that he’s no safer with the police than on his own. His boss and the cops think he’s guilty, the robbers know he got away, and now the local bikies are on his tail. All he knows is that he has to get to Perth and find his daughter. It’s quite a good set-up, and Heist isn’t trying to be anything other than a rollicking story, but it’s let down by clunky, overwritten dialogue, a string of clichéd characters and a plot that often feels as loosely planned as Ford’s own actions—his is certainly not a journey of self-discovery. It all seems overly complicated and under-structured. Heist will probably find readers in mines and backpackers’, but it’s hard to care about a ‘hero’ who doesn’t seem to care about himself.

Lachlan Jobbins is an editor, reviewer and ex-bookseller. He was one of the presenters of For the Love of Books on STUDIO (Foxtel)

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Category: Reviews