Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008)

What a slog this book was!! Hilarious, describing the British Invasion of Anguilla, which wanted to be ruled by Britain! A completely true and unbelievable farce! Excellent if you read chapter 1 and then skip to chapter 24 to the end. Boring as heck if you read the middle. The events occurred & the book was written in the late 1960s, and even though I was born in 1968, I was not remotely interested in the minuscule details related in these middle chapters, no matter how artfully stated. The book is worth reading for the story of the invasion—just, honestly, skip to chapter 24. Parts are so funny I’ll still be quoting them here. Enjoy.… (more)

In this third Parker novel, The Outfit tries to turn The Hunter into the hunted, and the single-minded hardcase has to prove that he, at least, can follow through on his threats.

The logistics section is particularly elaborate this time, featuring multiple crews as they case various organized criminal enterprises (the numbers racket, bookmaking, and a general-purpose Den of Iniquity), following the money from the corner drugstore to the big shots in the Outfit.

Both plot and theme make this much more of a direct sequel to The Hunter than The Man with the Getaway Face was, but these novels are all heavily serialized. Despite the formula, Westlake/Stark’s prose rarely feels formulaic, with the jarring exception of the catch-up passages aimed at readers coming to the novels out of order (which in some cases seem to be literal cut-and-paste jobs).… (more)