NOBODY RUNS FOREVER

A Novel By Richard Stark

Mysterious Press: 304 pp; $23.95


Mayhem in the Bank

Reviewed by Paula L. Woods, December 19, 2004, Washington Post

Donald E. Westlake is a wizard of the mystery genre, and a source of multiple personalities in his own right. Under his own name and various aliases, he has written more than 50 mysteries, including some 20 caper novels as Richard Stark. Featuring an antihero, a nasty bit of business named Parker, the series lay dormant for a quarter of a century until Stark breathed new life into it in 1997 with the aptly named Comeback. In Nobody Runs Forever (Mysterious, $23.95), Parker and his band of miscreants astonish us in the opening scene by swiftly dispatching a potential business partner whose only crime (if we ignore his planned heist of a cache of dental gold) was wearing a wire to a poker game.

Looking for another source of income, one of Parker's poker buddies suggests a doozy -- picking off an armored car carrying cash and other liquid assets from Deer Hill Bank to its new headquarters at Rutherford Combined Savings in the nearby Berkshires.

But as Parker soon realizes, "the hinge of the thing is an amateur," an ex-cop named Jake Beckham who once had an affair with Elaine Langen, wife of Deer Hill's president, the man who, not coincidentally, sent Jake to prison. Abetting the ex-con is his physician, Myron Madchen, desperate to save his mistress from further abuse at the hands of a violent husband; and Elaine herself, who has hated her husband ever since he used their marriage to gain control over her father's bank.

Add to the mix of sharply drawn characters Roy Keenan, a bounty hunter tracking the missing poker player, and his equally determined partner, Sandra, and the reader is off on an adventure that is mordantly funny as well as intricately plotted, with more turns than the New England back roads the gang takes to avoid the cops. Is the title of this latest installment a portent of things to come for the perversely likable Parker? Until that question is answered, do yourself a favor and read (or re-read) the other titles in this most excellent series.