Syd Fish's favourite local eatery is a cafe called The Acropolis, a place he likes because it never changes (this gives great insight into the man, right here). Val the owner of the cafe, corners Syd one night when he pops in for a bite to eat. She is a little concerned about the sudden disappearance of one of her regular customers, an old ex-jockey named Selwyn Dixon. Syd knows Dixon well, he's ignored him and his boring stories for years, but now he has been hired to look for the miserable old bugger.

What he finds is that there aren't too many people out there who are particularly concerned about the missing man, except for his landlord and that's only because he's behind with his rent. Even his employer, a horse-racing trainer, doesn't seem all that interested in his whereabouts. Something's up and it's not looking good for Selwyn.

Syd manages to find a link to a local smash repair workshop thanks to that faithful old plot device, the screwed up piece of paper in the bin. He follows his lead and finds himself nose to nose with his first confrontation with an aggressive bikie gang. The fact that he is picked up and thrown out of the garage doesn't sit well with the detective and he enlists the more able bodied help of local nightclub bouncer Luther Huck in a series of more pro-active confrontations.

Just how a missing ex-jockey could have anything to do with a bikie gang, who incidentally are running some kind of car rebirthing racket out of the smash repairs, is a mystery to Syd. But the further he digs the more certain he becomes that the connection is real.

Shark Bait is a snappy mystery that enlists a good deal of bikie by-play, uncovers a dodgy racing scam, stumbles over a dead body or two and finds Syd entering into an ill-advised bet to give up coffee. If he manages to survive the attention of some seriously pissed off Harley riders then it's quite possible that the caffeine withdrawals could just about kill him.

Syd Fish is the kind of protagonist who is a riot to follow thanks to a savagely dry wit a pithy observation on the town in which he lives not to mention a habit of stumbling into trouble at crucial moments. They're qualities that give him an endearing air, humanising him as a regular guy, but he is also blessed with a razor sharp mind that can piece together a sparse array of clues to form a credible, coherent conclusion.

Once again the characters who help him out in the earlier books make regular reappearances making it a real ensemble effort with developing personalities with which the reader can readily identify. There is a real sense of returning home for readers who have read the earlier books in the series, yet if you pick this up as the one and only Syd Fish book you read it works as a stand-alone.

A strongly plotted mystery, healthy doses of humour and a thoroughly likable main character ensures that Shark Bait is an absorbing detective novel. Written in 1993, it marks the last book in a series that looked to have a lot more life left in it. I'm sure Syd Fish is still kicking around the Cross somewhere getting under the skin of the local constabulary.