Mire by Matt Nable

Australian author and actor Matt Nable tried his hand at crime fiction in his 2021 novel Still. That book was historical crime fiction set in Australia’s Northern Territory in the 1960s. In his new crime novel, Mire, Nable once again goes back in time but not quite as far. Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mire tells a very different story of excess and bad behaviour.

Dan Milligan is what Tom Wolfe might have called a Master of the Universe. It is1987 and the stock market trader is riding high and living large in Sydney. Only the stock market crash sees that all go away and Dan soon finds himself on the skids, running a lawn mowing business on the NSW South Coast. Purely by chance he comes across a secret bunker in which he finds over one million dollars in cash. When the owners of the property move away Dan decides that it is safe to take the money and use it to get his old life back. What he doesn’t know is that the money belongs to the mafia and they do not take the theft lightly. Soon Dan finds himself in New York and forced to put his talents to work for the mob, only he also finds himself in the middle of efforts to bring the mafia down.

Dan Milligan is not a particularly likeable character. Nable does his best to explain where some of his insecurities and neediness comes from but in the end he is selfish and self-serving. But he is in good company. Nable’s narrative ranges across a rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells including Vinnie, the man who hid the money and is now on the run from the mafia himself, to bent cops, the FBI and police who are looking to bring the mafia down in any way they can.

There is a lot of suspension of disbelief required to make Mire work. Dan gets out of being killed by claiming to be a great futures trader but it is not clear why the mafia would buy that story or even if they did, why they would feel the need to import these skills from Australia. And then there are some things that the mafia make Dan do stretch believability just a touch. But readers who don’t sweat some of the detail will find a well plotted caper novel which provides a great sense of time and place, that spends most of its time on the wrong side of the law.

Mire by Matt Nable

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7.0/10