Sunday, October 20, 2013

Starktober 18: Lemons Never Lie

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In his three previous novels, Alan Grofield traveled to exotic locations like Acalpulco, Puerto Rico, and Quebec City, but Lemons Never Li...
Saturday, October 19, 2013

Starktober 17: Slayground

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Every good series needs at least one tour de force , to give the creator room to show off. For the Parker novels, that's Slayground : ...
Friday, October 18, 2013

Starktober 16: Deadly Edge

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This was one of his specialties, as electricity was one of Keegan's specialties and driving was one of Morris's. Rare is the high...
Thursday, October 17, 2013

Sad But True

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"There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These p...

Starktober 15: The Blackbird

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After pointing out a few days ago that the Parker novel The Black Ice Score was "amazingly non-racist" in its view of African p...
Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Starktober 14: The Sour Lemon Score

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It was stupid. There was no sense in it, and things without sense in them irritated him. Uhl was too docile, too easy. Somehow he was too...
Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Starktober 13: The Black Ice Score

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Parker does not take well to being told what to do. He always claims to be a cool professional, but, like so many other people, he has a c...
Monday, October 14, 2013

Starktober 12: The Dame

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Richard Stark's Parker novels are all very much the same thing: taut crime thrillers, propelled forward at speed by a single-minded an...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/12

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Nearly every week, I get some books in the mail, sent to me by the hard-working publicists of trade book publishing. I will never manage t...
Sunday, October 13, 2013

Starktober: Who Do You Want to Be?

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"Let us suppose, let us suppose there's a crap game going on in that park across the street. In the crap game there's two burg...
Saturday, October 12, 2013

Starktober 11: The Green Eagle Score

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Parker looked at them, Fusco scared, Devers confident, Ellen angry. He considered, and finally shrugged, letting it go. For now he'd ...
Friday, October 11, 2013

Starktober 10: The Rare Coin Score

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The Parker novels, read closely, start to look like Richard Stark giving himself very specific plot triggers and then trying to get throug...
Thursday, October 10, 2013

Starktober 9: The Damsel

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Parker doesn't appears once in the pages of The Damsel -- just so you know. This time out, Stark follows the adventures of Parker...
Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Starktober 8: The Handle

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Parker is a professional thief, and his jobs usually fall into the same broad outline: some private company has a lot of money in one loca...
Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Starktober 7: The Seventh

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In the aftermath of The Jugger , Parker is on the run, his former leisure-time cover as Charles Willis blown and with no resources except ...