Flashfire
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Melander likes to do things flashy. When Parker finds himself working with Melander on a bank heist in a mid-sized midwestern city, his job is throwing a Molotov cocktail into a gas station. The resulting explosion sends the cops and fire trucks to the east side of town, while Melander and his gang plunder the bank on the west side. But Parker doesn't care for Melander's plan for a new heist, one that will clean out Palm Beach of a lot of very expensive jewelry. What Parker really dislikes is Melander's intention to use the proceeds from the bank job to capitalize the Palm Beach job... including Parker's cut. Melander is very polite about Parker's disinterest, and very sincere about paying him his share... with interest... after the jewelry job goes down.
But that's not the way Parker works. Now he's tailing the gang down South, with a plan for getting his own back... and the entire swag of gems besides.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How does Stark know so much about the mechanics of crime? In this latest installment of the miraculously revitalized career of master criminal Parker (after 1999's Backflash), Stark (aka Donald Westlake) blithely reveals how to use a telephone repairman's tools to check if a house is empty, how to find cash to steal in an increasingly electronic economy, how to launder money by making up a fictitious church. He does this all without boasting or moralizing, describing Parker's abilities and stomping grounds in the clean, pungent, poetically understated prose that makes him one of our best noir novelists. "The condos along the narrow strip of island south of the main part of Palm Beach yearn toward a better life: something English, somewhere among the landed gentry," Stark writes about Florida's temple to wealth and privilege. Parker has come to Palm Beach because three associates have just done the unthinkable: cheated him out of his share of the money from a bank heist. With the deadly precision of a heat-seeking missile, barely deterred by serious attempts on his life because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Parker messes up the plans of his former colleagues in a major way. This is great, dirty fun: you can't help seeing the pouchy face of Lee Marvin (who played ParkerDrenamed WalkerDin Point Blank, based on an early Stark book) as you turn the pages. In the 23-year gap between the 20th and 21st Parker episodes, Westlake has recharged his batteries with a formula he should market to other writers.
