By Richard Stark
You most likely haven’t ever spotted them. yet they’ve spotted you. They discover everything. That’s their task. Sitting quietly in a nondescript motor vehicle open air a financial institution making observe of the tellers’ paintings behavior, the positions of the protection guards. Lagging a couple of automobile lengths at the back of the Brinks truck on its day-by-day rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the deal with of an unmarked carrier door on the racetrack.
They’re thieves. Heisters, to be special. They’re execs, and Parker is much and away the easiest of them. If you’re making plans a task, you will want him in. tricky, clever, hardworking, and relentlessly curious about his exchange, he's the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t are looking to move him, and also you don’t are looking to get in his means, simply because he’ll cease at not anything to get what he’s after.
Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark’s eponymous secret novels, is among the such a lot unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded through critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style—and cherished through fanatics who flip each one intoxicating web page with expanding urgency—Stark is a grasp of crime writing; his books as influential as any within the style. The collage of Chicago Press has launched into a undertaking to come back the early volumes of this sequence to print for a brand new iteration of readers to discover—and turn into addicted to.
Parker works with a gaggle con males in The Score on his largest activity yet—robbing a whole city in North Dakota.
“Whatever Stark writes, I learn. He’s a stylist, a professional, and that i completely get pleasure from his attitude.”—Elmore Leonard
“Westlake understands accurately tips on how to seize a reader, draw her or him into the tale, after which slowly tighten his grip till get away is impossible.”—Washington submit booklet World
“Donald Westlake’s Parker novels are one of the small variety of books I learn many times. put out of your mind all that crap you’ve been telling your self approximately War and Peace and Proust—these are the books you’ll wish on that desolate tract island.”—Lawrence Block