Stark, Richard: Nobody Runs Forever

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According to the list of novels at the beginning of the book, Nobody Runs Forever is the 26th installment in Richard Stark's series featuring professional thief Parker. In this outing, after one heist has to be aborted during the early planning stages, Parker falls in with an acquaintance who's got a line on another job: the transfer of assets from one bank to another during a merger, coupled with some insider information, provides an opportunity for a big haul. The book follows Parker and his associates through the preliminaries to the heist, a few weeks during which they have to scout out locations and get their hands on weaponry and put out a number of fires--calming squirming accomplices, threatening others who don't follow directions. Throughout, Parker remains smart and cautious and deadly serious about his work. We also follow developments from the perspectives of a number of characters on the periphery of the main action, including a police woman who is suspicious of Parker's claim that he's a landscaper.

After having read this book and Ask the Parrot, which is the next in the series (see my review), I am eager to read all of them. They are smart and well-written and provide a fascinating look at crime from an unusual perspective, that of the cold-blooded professional. We learn very little about Parker as a character except that he is good at what he does, yet we don't come away from the book thinking him two-dimensional. He is rather unknowable. It's also interesting that so much of the book is cerebral. The focus is on the planning of the crime. Its execution is almost anticlimactic. Again, somehow this works.

Here's hoping all of the Parker novels will soon be released for the Amazon Kindle.