Richard Stark

Master criminal Parker and his cohorts return to an abandoned country church where they had been forced to abandon the spoils of a bank heist, an endeavor during which he drives an old choir van and works to outmaneuver foes on both sides of the law.

A master thief must build a team to escape a correctional center in this fast-paced, hard-boiled crime novel by the author of Firebreak. With Parker locked up and about to be unmasked, Breakout follows his Houdini-like escape from prison with a team of convicts. But when a new heist and new dangers-con artists, snitches, busybodies, eccentrics, and cops-loom among the dark alleys and old stone buildings of the big city to which they've fled, Parker...

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...

After the bloodbath of Butcher's Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while 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...

Not many men knew what Parker did for a living, because what he did was steal. But Joe Sheer, a retired safecracker-known in the business as a jugger-knew. He knew Parker's alias, his whereabouts, his plans-and because he knew too much, he knew to keep his mouth shut. Or die. But Joe was more than ready to trade what he knew for a soft mattress, windows without bars on them, and what every man needs-his freedom. So Parker had come to Nebraska to...

You probably haven't noticed them, but they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They're heisters. They're pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. In The Hunter, the first volume...

The Outfit was organized crime with a capital O. They were big; they were bad; they were brutal. No crook ever crossed them and lived to enjoy it-except Parker. So they wanted Parker dead, and a hit man proved they meant business. Too bad for the Outfit he missed. Ripping off the Outfit was the easy part of Parker's game. Going one-on-one with Bronson, the Outfit's big boss, was the hard part.

Parker is a thief who has an unusual code. He doesn't steal from the poor or hurt innocent people. He is asked to join four other guys, one of whom is related to a known mobster. They pull off the job flawlessly and Parker wants to part ways with them. When he refuses to join them for another job, they try to kill him. They dispose of his body, but someone finds him...still alive. After recovering, he sets out to get back at the ones who tried to...

Using a Nebraska plastic surgeon to create a new face, Parker, a master thief, plots revenge on the Outfit, an organization that is trying to kill him, as he sets up robberies in Outfit territory and waits for a confrontation with the head boss.