I suppose the key word here is "next". Port Vila Blues was published in 1995 and is the fifth Wyatt novel. Wyatt, from 2010, is the seventh. Presumably they mean "next to be published by Soho Crime" but what they actually said is dishearteningly misleading.

The book itself is also a disappointment for readers who come to it hoping for something on the level of the Parker novels written by Donald Westlake under the name Richard Stark.

Indeed, that's why I had read a few of these Wyatt novels already, in the '90s, including Port Vila Blues, but have no memory of them other than being disappointed and noting that Wyatt is always tensing. "Wyatt tensed" is a favorite phrase of Disher's and it appears at least three times in Wyatt.

But perhaps you are already objecting that it isn't fair to compare these books to Westlake/Stark's Parker series.

Well, Westlake himself was kind enough to suggest that Parker had changed his name to Wyatt and moved to Australia. That's how I found out about these books in the first place.

Disher hardly tries to distance himself from the Parker model either. Quite the opposite. Wyatt lives in an apartment complex called Westlake Towers, partners up for a heist with someone named Stark and then wriggles out of a dire situation by stealing the identity of someone named Parker. He literally becomes "Parker" in this book.

But in name only. We're always being told how great Wyatt is, and Disher alternates between giving him superhuman abilities and having him be clueless to a similarly incredulous extent.

Wyatt's set-up is pure fantasy and a fairly cuckoo concoction with a fortune in valuable paintings and two expensive apartments, one to live in and one to escape to in case of trouble. Except that the apartments are in the same building! Which, sure, might seem convenient, but what if the bad trouble prevents you from returning to the building, not just the apartment? There are other obvious objections to Wyatt's arrangement here, but that's the first one that comes to mind.

The heist itself is a simple one that gets way too complicated and involves too many characters, none of them believable or even interesting. The action in the book is also all over the place. I had no idea that Melbourne was so indifferent to shooting guns and torching cars.

The story involves robbing a courier carrying stolen jewels except this time he's carrying millions of dollars in bonds instead and he's also a bad-ass killer and it gets tangled up with various betrayals and loose cannon people of whom the most ridiculous is a psycho stripper named Khandi Cane.

Wyatt has spidey sense that tells him when someone is standing outside of his building but not when someone is standing right behind him. Characters are introduced just to be the recipients of violence and then disappear from the story without ever dong anything memorable.

Wyatt himself, when things go haywire, doesn't react much better than the average person and Disher doesn't mind moving things along with outrageous coincidences and contrivances.

It was interesting to revisit this character thirty years later but you're better off just re-reading one of the original Parker books from the '60s and '70s.

The first line is "Wyatt was waiting to rob a man of $75,000".