Richard Stark

Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark's eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters in hard-boiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose, Stark is a master of crime writing. His books are as influential as any in the genre. Parker goes under the knife in The Man with the Getaway Face, changing his face to escape the mob and a contract on his life. Along the way...

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating...

Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who begins to pick off his fellow hoisters, one by one. The first mistake? He doesn't begin things by putting a bullet in Parker. That means he won't get the chance to make a second. One of the darkest novels...

Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital-the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen...

Here's Parker-planning to steal the entire payroll of an Air Force base in upstate New York, with help from Marty Fusco-whose fresh out of the pen-and a smart aleck finance clerk named Devers. Holed up with family in a scrappy little town, the hoisters prepare for the risky job by trying to shorten the odds. But the ice is thinner than Parker likes to think-and Marty's ex-wife is much more complicated.

A professional criminal helps pull off an underworld heist, then is gunned down and left for dead. He resurfaces to track down his share of the loot.