The Haul
A Heist Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 7 Jul 2026
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- 12,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
A professional thief takes the chance of a lifetime when he agrees to mastermind the raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker in this action-packed heist thriller set in the heart of contemporary Los Angeles, from master of West Coast noir Gary Phillips. Perfect for fans of Sara Paretsky and Michael Connelly.
After years of close calls, O’Conner—the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge”—spends most of his time in semi-retirement, running his legitimate businesses and playing pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his middle-class neighborhood is the wiser to his double life.
But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay dead. When he’s approached with a job he can’t resist, he agrees to mastermind his biggest heist yet: a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker, hidden beneath his newly constructed basketball arena. As the job goes down, testing O’Conner’s mettle with new challenges, the promise of the score attracts ghosts from his past he thought were long buried.
Interwoven with flashbacks to O’Conner’s coming-of-age as an orphan in Los Angeles, this pulse-pounding story is both an homage to Donald Westlake’s Parker series and a rich portrait of a morally gray thief at a crossroads.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Phillips's punchy sequel to The Warlord of Willow Ridge is a raucous, ripped-from-the-headlines heist novel. The mononymous O'Conner is a master thief who parlays his ill-gotten gains into legitimate businesses, including a motorcycle shop in, while living an otherwise quiet suburban life in Southern California. He's lured out of semiretirement by Mavis Joyner, a former employee of tech billionaire Palmer Van Noy. Joyner asks O'Conner to help her raid Van Noy's bunker underneath a basketball arena, where the oligarch plans to sit out the apocalypse alongside $20 million in cash. O'Conner can't resist his generous cut of the jackpot, so he puts together a team of professionals and sets the plan in motion. Things get complicated when unsavory players from O'Conner's past and a rogue gang of sheriff's deputies come out of the woodwork to interfere. The action is interspersed with flashbacks to O'Conner's childhood in a group home, where he flexed his prodigious talents as a lock-picker and was educated in the street codes of South Central Los Angeles. Phillips conjures the pulpy grandeur of paperback crime novels from the 1960s and '70s, then elevates it with sharp characterizations and a contemporary Robin Hood morality. Readers will be rapt. Agents: Dave Hale Smith and Gideon Pine, InkWell Management.
