Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008)

“Call him and ask him,” the voice said, “what you should do if you owe some money to a guy named Parker.”

Boom! And off we go! THE Parker book!!! Almost twice the length of the previous books!
Parker, with Grofield, are back at Fun Island Amusement Park to retrieve the money they left behind from the armored car heist in “Slayground”. The local ‘ boss’ , Lozini, is still there too, and he’s still mad! When things get heavy, Parker calls on an army of former “co-workers” show more - basically everyone who he’s pulled jobs with in the first 15 books! Well, everyone that’s still alive, that is...
I loved this book! It's like a greatest hits volume of the series up until that point! I'd reccommend reading the first 15 books before this, but it isn't totally neccessary. Unless, of course, you owe Parker money. Then, you'd better just pay him, as all previous stories have taught us. $73,000 in this book, or $45,000 in the first book. Just pay the man. It just ain't worth it not to...

“I’m only the messenger!”
“Now you’re the message,” Parker told him, and shot him.

THAT’S my Parker! show less

Dortmunder falls into a convent full of silent nuns who, despite just about everything about him, see him as a Godsend, just the man they need to rescue their sister, kidnapped by her obscenely wealthy father and held for deprogramming on the top floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. This is not the sort of thing John does. It's not even the sort of thing John approves of, but he hatches a scheme and puts together a string and before you know it there's burgling and rescuing going on and show more everything might even work out for the best. Except the obscenely rich father is planning a coup in a South American country and figures the floor below the top floor is as good a place as any to keep his mercenary army for the weekend before flying them out. And that's what Dortmunder's got to get through to get to the nun and then back down through again to get her out, and soon the nun's rescuing John and everyone's rescuing each other and there's mercenaries and security guards and cops everywhere and a ton of loot and one nun and Dortmunder and pals all wondering who's going to rescue them.

All-time classic comedy crime caper. You cannot do better for lifting rainy-day blues. show less

Westlake's big blockbuster commercial international thriller: a heist with aspects much too dark and horrible for Dortmunder but an adventure too exuberant and freewheeling for Parker; instead we get one of those unique Westlake creations full of sly humour and with but with horror and violence lurking not far into the shadows. Mercenaries and corrupt operators and ousted Asian businessmen conspire to rob Idi Amin of a train full of coffee. It's a big, complex operation full of many moving show more parts with plenty of opportunities for betrayal and setbacks and a nasty price to pay when things do go wrong. Fantastic characters, intricate plotting, hair-raising situtations and unusually, for Westlake, graphic sex, all combine in a pot-boiler executed with rare craft and competency. show less

"The Hook" is a clever and amusing work that seems like it could have been as much fun to write as it is to read. It features two writers of fiction who make a Faustian deal that gets the better of them. Bryce Proctorr is a successful author with a bad case of writer's block, not to mention a trophy wife who is taking him for all she can get in their pending divorce. Wayne Prentice is a fading author who can't interest publishers in his manuscripts. Bryce offers a deal: if Wayne gives him is show more unpublished manuscript, he'll publish it under his own name, and the two can split the profits. But there's a catch: Wayne also has to murder Bryce's soon-to-be ex wife.

Things go right, up to a point, and then they go very wrong -- the plan was a good one, but didn't take into account the flaws and peculiarities in the two protagonists. To say more would ruin the story, but suffice to say that the ending -- five chilling words -- is both shocking and funny.

The similarity to Highsmith's "Strangers on a Train" is purposeful, and gives the tale a Hitchcockian flavor, but with elements of wit. Westlake has fun with his two main characters; they are (in effect) two sides of same coin, or better still, represent the two personas that each struggling writer wrestles with. The characters have similar names (Proctorr and Prentice), and tongue-in-cheek hints to their twinness abound, e.g., with titles of their past books ("The Two Faces in the Mirror," "The Shadowed Other," "The Domino Doublet, "An Only Twin," "Two of a Kind," and "The Pollux Perspective.").

Westfall is a novelist that I've only recently sampled, but he is now on my list of popular writers not to miss. show less