NOBODY RUNS FOREVER [Signed]

Master criminal Parker is back and in deeper, darker trouble than ever before. The classic anti-hero is forced to use every trick in his dubious arsenal to avoid having to pay the ultimate price for his questionable line of work.

Adult/High School–When a game of seven-card stud among a group of criminals produces a potential police informer with a communications device taped to his chest, Parker loses no time in strangling him. The group cancels its heist plans and breaks up, but Parker and three others soon reconvene. With inside information from the wife of a local bank president, they plan on robbing an armored car. Parker and his cohorts manage to pull off the job and stash the cash, but the cops are hot on their trail. Action scenes provide motion and movement. Characters often seem sketchy at first, but they round out as the story unfolds. Even the secondary figures stand out as clearly defined individuals, and their roles, which may be small, remain key elements in the plot. The tension builds with the thieves' reactions as the story winds tightly toward the ending. Stark's careful control over every element results in a fascinating novel, a look at the true price of crime, and an opportunity to enjoy another book by this master writer (aka Donald Westlake).–Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. You just can't get good criminal help these days. That's what Stark's heist-meister Parker quickly discovers as he tries to make a score to repair his sagging finances—no doubt wounded by recent economic ills. First, the plan of would-be hijackers of dental gold in Cincinnati turns to rubbish when one of the conspirators is found wearing a wire. Then a genial idiot with a workable plan for a robbery during a bank merger is found to be carrying too much emotional baggage, especially in his sexual connection to the wife of one of the bankers. And finally, a coldhearted bounty hunter who's almost as good at his job as Parker is threatens everything when he stumbles across the bank robbery scheme while looking for the wire-wearer. Stark (aka MWA Grandmaster Donald Westlake) offers lots of bleak fun as well as intriguing physical details of the illegal variety and righteously sharp descriptions of people we pass every day on the street. A sentence like "She wasn't slender; she was bone thin, and inside the stylish clothes she walked with a graceless jitteriness, like someone whose medicine had been cut off too soon" nails the banker's wife in an instant. This stellar series just gets better and better.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

He reaps fortunes in his heists, but fortune rarely smiles on taciturn tough guy Parker--and this might be his toughest-luck caper yet. Instead of just throwing obstacles into his antihero's path to a clean getaway, Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) springs a series of booby traps on Parker and his ad hoc crew well before the job goes down. From jittery ex-cons and vindictive wives to dogged bounty hunters and meddlesome sisters, the rotten eggs keep multiplying. But they fail to throw Parker off the scent of the lucrative score: a line of armored cars transferring assets of a bought-out bank into the vaults of its victorious competitor. By the time Parker gets his hands on the loot, it looks like he's covered too many bad bets to walk away from the table flush. But only a fool would count out the shrewdest sociopath this side of Tom Ripley. Is this a fitting coda to a great hard-boiled series, or just the latest in an entertaining string of impossible escapes? Only Parker knows for sure and, as usual, he ain't talking. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved