Showing results for "Richard Parker" in All Categories

You probably haven't noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They're heisters.

The Abe clan and its allies are in full rebellion. When the Emperor's greatest military leader, Yoshii, is targeted for assassination by magic, it is up to the newly sober Lord Yamada and his exorcist associate Kenji to keep the young man alive long enough to put down the uprising before the entire country is consumed by war. Yamada knows how to deal with demons, monsters, and angry ghosts, but the greatest threat of all is one final assassin, hidden most secretly of all.

Yamada no Goji is a minor nobleman of ancient Japan who has lost everything - except a single purpose: keep a promise to the woman he loved. In order to fulfill his vow, all he has to do is fight a horde of demons and monsters, bargain with a few ghosts, outwit the sinister schemers of the emperor's court, find a way to defeat an assassin who cannot be seen, heard, or touched - and change the course of history.

The Outfit was organized crime with a capital O. They were big. They were bad. They were brutal. And no crook ever crossed them and lived to enjoy it. Except Parker. So they wanted Parker dead, and a hit man proved they meant business. Too bad for the Outfit he missed. Ripping off the Outfit was the easy part of Parker's game. Going one-on-one with Bronson, the Outfit's Big Boss, was the hard part.

Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark's eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style, Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre. Parker goes under the knife in The Man with the Getaway Face, changing his face to escape the mob and a contract on his life. Along the way he scores his biggest heist yet.

In an ancient Japan where the incursions of gods, ghosts, and demons into the living world is an everyday event, an impoverished nobleman named Yamada no Goji makes his living as a demon hunter for hire. With the occasional assistance of the reprobate exorcist Kenji, whatever the difficulty - ogres, demons, fox-spirits - for a price Yamada will do what needs to be done, even and especially if the solution to the problem isn’t as simple as the edge of a sword.

After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, “Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone.” But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead” - and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks.

It was an impossible crime: knock off an entire North Dakota town called Copper Canyon - clean out the plant payroll, both banks, and all the stores in one night. Parker called it "science fiction," but with the right men (a score of them), he could figure it out to the last detail. It could work. If the men behaved like pros, cool and smart; if they didn't get impatient, start chasing skirts, or decide to take the opportunity to settle secret old scores…they just might pull it off.

Africa has been known as "the cradle of mankind", and its recoverable history stretches back to the Pharaohs. But the idea of studying African history is itself new, and the authors show why it is still contested and controversial. This VSI, the first concise work of its kind, will prove essential for anyone interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history. 

This is a spectacular story of error and innovation, a wild ride from a vision to the realization of an iconic cultural landscape. It reflects the park’s uniqueness, but just as strongly that of the man who built it with a watchmaker’s precision, an artist’s conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler.

Deadly Edge bids a brutal adieu to the 1960s as Parker robs a rock concert, and the heist goes south. Soon Parker finds himself - and his woman, Claire - menaced by a pair of sadistic, drug-crazed hippies. Parker has a score to settle while Claire’s armed with her first rifle - and they’re both ready to usher in the end of the Age of Aquarius.

Master criminal Parker takes another turn for the worse as he tries to recover loot from a heist gone terribly wrong. Parker and two cohorts stole the assets of a bank in transit, but the police heat was so great they could only escape if they left the money behind. Now Parker and his associates plot to reclaim the loot, which they hid in the choir loft of an unused country church.

Racing through the backwoods of Massachusetts and on the verge of being taken down for one of the biggest and most disastrous bank heists the state has ever seen, Parker runs right into the barrel of a gun pointed from the wrong side of the law. A quiet and angry recluse with only a silent parrot for company in his seclusion, Tom Lindahl saves Parker from the police dogs, but enmeshes him in yet another in a long line of dubious, highly dangerous, but seriously profitable jobs.

The heist was a piece of cake. It didn't bother Parker that the priceless statue was in a Russian diplomat's house… because he had no scruples about ripping off a Red. It didn't bother Parker that his ex-girlfriend had blackmailed him into pulling this job… because he figured out how to make an extra fifty grand on the deal. It did bother Parker that somebody else was trying to steal the statue first - because being second wasn't Parker's style. Whether he was up against the mob or the KGB, Parker intended to beat them all at the stealing game. Of course, he didn't count on a double cross....

The 16th Parker novel, Butcher’s Moon, is more than twice as long most of the master heister’s adventures, and absolutely jammed with the action, violence, and nerve-jangling tension listeners have come to expect. Back in the corrupt town where he lost his money, and nearly his life, in Slayground, Parker assembles a stunning cast of characters from throughout his career for one gigantic, blowout job: starting - and finishing - a gang war. It feels like the Parker novel to end all Parker novels, and for nearly 25 years, that’s what it was.

Between Parker’s 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital - the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen old masters - which will fetch Parker a pretty penny if his team can just get it past the mansion’s tight security.

Not many men knew what Parker did for a living, because what he did was steal. But Joe Sheer, a retired safecracker knew. He knew Parker's alias, his whereabouts, his plans... and because he knew too much, he knew to keep his mouth shut. Or die. But Joe was more than ready to trade what he knew for what every man needs - his freedom. So Parker had come to Nebraska to find the old jugger... and probably murder him. But what Parker found was trouble: Joe was already six feet under.

Baron is clever - perhaps too clever. He sits on the heavily protected island of Cockaigne, a mini-Las Vegas forty miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, raking in as much as $250,000 some nights, laughing at the Outfit, who can’t collect their cut. Now the Outfit can no longer stand the loss of face - not to mention the loss of revenue. That’s why they’ve sent for Parker, who knows that the line between success and failure on this score would be exactly the length of the barrel of a .38.

The good guys in a new African nation were missing a treasury full of diamonds. The nation's corrupt leader had stashed the rocks somewhere in New York City. Now the good guys needed a specialist to get their diamonds back. So they came to the best in the business: Parker. Only the three mysterious tough guys came to Parker, too. They figured three hands filled with .38s could convince him to pass up this international gem game. But leaning on Parker was like pressuring a box of TNT with a short fuse.

The robbery was a piece of cake. The getaway was clean. And seven men were safely holed up in different places while Parker held all the cash. But somehow the sweet heist of a college football game turns sour, Parker's woman is murdered, and the take is stolen. Now Parker's looking for the lowlife who did him dirty, while the cops are looking for seven clever thieves - and Parker must outrun them all. When hunters and hunted meet, some win, some lose….