Penzler / Mysterious
Published September 15, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Before we get to the details, a quick note: you can count on anything Gary Disher writes. You’d think given the dozens of crime novels he’s written, he might start phoning it in, but no. He continues to surprise. As for Sanctuary…
Grace (one of her many names) has been a skilled thief for most of her young life. Raised in foster homes, she started her life of crime in her teens along with Adam, an older foster brother, then got connected to a crooked cop who controlled her life until he was out of the picture. Now she’s on her own, moving around Australia looking for her next score. At a convention for collectors of rare stamps, she’s hoping to nab something valuable enough to fence, but when she sees Adam is also there, she has to bolt. He’s been looking for her ever since she not only dumped him, she stole a valuable watch from him, and he’s out for revenge.
She comes to rest in a small town where a woman who owns an antique store is looking for help. She has a bit of an agoraphobia problem, she tells Grace, and needs someone to mind the shop; to sweeten the deal, she has a cottage behind her house Grace can live in until she finds a place of her own. Grace doesn’t expect to find a place of her own – ever – but is grateful for a chance to rest and imagine what it would be like to be a normal person doing a normal job. It’s a role that takes some adjustments. She knows antiques and collectibles, but has never been able to let down her guard. And it’s just as well. It turns out that her boss’s agoraphobia is thanks to an ex who wants to kill her. Though they don’t know it, both Grace and her boss are in hiding, but not for long.
Disher is a marvel at making characters come to life with a few deft strokes. Like Elmore Leonard, he doesn’t use any extra words, but is able to weave a complicated web for his vivid cast: hypervigilant Grace, her frightened boss, Adam, who is on the run himself from a man he helped to scam but who has an ambivalent relationship with Grace that mixes anger with affection, and the boss’s ex, who is an internet scammer himself and a walking embodiment of the worst of the manosphere. It sounds like too much, but it’s a wonderfully knotty bundle of double-crosses and pursuits, all rendered in confident, spare, and graceful prose.
If you haven’t read Gary Disher before, this is a fine place to start. And then you can enjoy the extensive backlist of a three-time Ned Kelly award winning author who hasn’t put a foot wrong yet.