"Stark, Donald E. Westlake's more bad-tempered alter ego, breaks his usual rule and gives women—ballsy Sandra and dispassionate Claire—major roles. Not that Parker takes a back seat for a minute. The man is fiercely conceived, one mean piece of work."
Parker, the world's most ruthless noir anti-hero, engineers a bank withdrawal.
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"Stark, Donald E. Westlake's more menacing alter ego, flaunts his usual wizardry as unobtrusively as if he were ordering from a fast-food menu. The plot is minimalist, the technique superb."
"A little too much situational bumbling better suited to one of the Dortmunder plots of Stark's alter ego, Donald E. Westlake. Still, if you want to make a killing, Parker's your kind of guy."
Unrepentant antihero Parker (Breakout, 2002, etc.) breaks yet more laws.
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"A minor but very readable effort from master craftsman Stark (Firebreak, 2001, etc.)."
When an attempt to lift generic pharmaceuticals from a warehouse goes belly-up, career criminal Ronald Kasper/Edward Johnson/Charles Willis/Edward Lynch/the indomitable Parker, world-class antihero, finds himself in Stoneveldt Prison, friendless and itchy to escape.
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From the call to attention in the opening sentence ("When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man") to the decision on the last page that one more killing would be overkill, Parker, the poster boy for bad behavior, leads a nonexemplary life.
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"But the author's blithe disdain for plausibility and an unfortunate sequence with paramilitarists would better suit his alter ego Donald E. Westlake's comic capers."
Waiting for his new associates to divvy up the proceeds from a Nebraska bank heist with him, Parker, the toughest professional criminal not behind bars, learns there are no proceeds: The boys plan on using it to finance their next job—stealing 12 million dollars' worth of jewelry in Palm Beach.
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"Donald E. Westlake), like his outlaw hero, is never less than professional, and he supplies the fastest 300 pages you're likely to read this year."
When a road crash leaves Marshall Howell trapped in a wrecked getaway car, his partner, master thief Parker, has to decide whether or not to kill him before he skedaddles with their $140,000 haul.
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"If you're new to Stark's work, think of all the comic Dortmunder capers he's written under his real name—Donald E. Westlake—but with as baleful an absence of humor as in The Ax (p. 753)."
Following in the footsteps of fellow-thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, Stark's hero Parker returns from a 20-year retirement in this taut caper, which begins with a routine $400,000 heist from the Reverend William Archibald's Christian Crusade (the inside man, Tom Carmody, is an angel who's gotten religion and thinks money is the root of the Rev.'s evil).
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