Richard Stark

After the publication of Butcher's Moon in 1974, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And readers waited. But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker's as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, "suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor"-and the novels that followed showed that neither Parker nor Stark had lost a step....

Parker agrees to take part in the nearly half-million dollar robbery of a Christian crusade, having been given inside help by a disgruntled worker in the Rev. William Archibald's camp, but things start to go wrong when one of the trio of robbers decides he wants to keep all the money for himself.

Parker thinks he's home free when a quiet recluse in the backwoods of Massachusetts saves him from being taken into custody by the police who are pursuing him for having pulled off one of the biggest and most dangerous bank heists the state has ever seen. Little does Parker realize that this recluse, with only a parrot for company, has something even more dubious and dangerous in mind for him. A whistleblower, tossed aside by a corrupt political establishment,...

Anti-hero and criminal mastermind Parker is in for the "heist of a lifetime" and a whole lot of trouble. Stark (who is also Donald E. Westlake) lives in upstate New York.-Ann Kim - Library Journal

Melander likes to do things flashy. When Parker finds himself working with Melander on a bank heist in a mid-sized midwestern city, his job is throwing a Molotov cocktail into a gas station. The resulting explosion sends the cops and fire trucks to the east side of town, while Melander and his gang plunder the bank on the west side. Parker doesn't care for flashy, himself. And he doesn't care for Melander's plan for a new heist, one that will clean...