Flashfire

Starred review from October 30, 2000
How does Stark know so much about the mechanics of crime? In this latest installment of the miraculously revitalized career of master criminal Parker (after 1999's Backflash), Stark (aka Donald Westlake) blithely reveals how to use a telephone repairman's tools to check if a house is empty, how to find cash to steal in an increasingly electronic economy, how to launder money by making up a fictitious church. He does this all without boasting or moralizing, describing Parker's abilities and stomping grounds in the clean, pungent, poetically understated prose that makes him one of our best noir novelists. "The condos along the narrow strip of island south of the main part of Palm Beach yearn toward a better life: something English, somewhere among the landed gentry," Stark writes about Florida's temple to wealth and privilege. Parker has come to Palm Beach because three associates have just done the unthinkable: cheated him out of his share of the money from a bank heist. With the deadly precision of a heat-seeking missile, barely deterred by serious attempts on his life because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Parker messes up the plans of his former colleagues in a major way. This is great, dirty fun: you can't help seeing the pouchy face of Lee Marvin (who played ParkerDrenamed WalkerDin Point Blank, based on an early Stark book) as you turn the pages. In the 23-year gap between the 20th and 21st Parker episodes, Westlake has recharged his batteries with a formula he should market to other writers.

August 1, 2000
If there was a Mohs' scale for the hardness of hard-boiled crime novels, it might be aptly named for Richard Stark. His character, Parker, is just about the coldest, hardest, most resolute professional thief in print today. Some of Parker's actions and calculations are purely chilling. So it's especially ironic, or better, remarkable, that Stark is actually Donald E. Westlake, who is better known for the comic capers of his star-crossed crook, Dortmunder. Here the flint-hard Parker has joined three other pros in robbing a midwestern bank. As soon as they make their getaway, the trio invites Parker to join them in a really big score--$12 million in diamonds from a Palm Beach mansion. Parker opts out, even after they explain that they need his share of the bank robbery as seed money. Righteously angry at being stiffed, Parker resolves to steal the Palm Beach haul from them. Needing his own seed money, Parker stages a series of carefully wrought but violent and brazen robberies. But an accident of poor timing--the kind of unforeseeable accident that usually forces Dortmunder to steal the same thing three times--puts Parker in the gunsights of professional hitmen and threatens his efforts to get more than even with his onetime partners. Diamond-hard crime fiction. ((Reviewed August 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)