Butcher's Moon

Even for the excellent Parker series, this one is super great! The Parker character is cool and professional as always. This novel connects back to the heist in the novel Slayground, although you don't need to read it to appreciate this one. The spare, raw writing of this series was never better. It kept me up all night.

I admit it: I love the Parker novels-- all of them (though the very new "Nobody Runs Forever" is distressingly focusless and my least favorite of the thirty-book series). "Butcher's Moon" is one of the best, though. It has everything we've come to expect from Richard Stark and his creation: terse, propulsive narration, utterly amoral behavior by our protagonist, unpredictable plotting, and brutal action. The book is hard to find-- I have a copy in a box that I trip over every five years and read again, but I've never seen it in used bookstores in the last 20 years. When it pops up for sale, grab it. And in the meantime, read any and all of the other Starks/Parkers (and all the other Westlakes as well).

What's common with most Parker novels (and let me say that this is the ONLY common thing about them), is the length, around 200 pages a pop. But for the 20th and final Parker adventure--until the aptly titled COMEBACK was published in 1995--Richard Stark has treated us with a fat 300 page epic called BUTCHER'S MOON. And what a treat it is! Parker, our favorite anti-hero, has once again teamed up with fellow professional thief, Grofield, to recover the stashed loot from a previous score. The loot is long gone, of course, and soon getting it back takes a back seat to getting revenge. Parker calls in all of his old friends--and I mean ALL of 'em, even retired thief Handy McKay jumps at the chance to join the party--because what Parker has planned is nothing short of a war, The Thieves vs. The Hoods, and when it's over an entire town will be cleaned out, a mob outfit will lay in ruins and Parker & Company will be stepping over the bodies.

It took me 13 years to find this book and I can honestly say it was worth the wait. Those who have encountered Parker before do not need encouragement to read this, but for the first timer this book will open your mind to a totally different kind of hero, one you find yourself rooting for even though you find no common principles between you. Fairness, the ability to see an argument from another's view, willingness to compromise, to Parker these are foreign phrases. In this book a Mafia boss tries to make Parker understand that what he wants is simply not possible, indeed more than one person tries to make Parker see sense. But Parker is as unstoppable and inevitable as the juggernaut, if you attempt to interfere, at best, you can hope he'll ignore you, at worst, you'll make him mad. This book showed for the first time that Parker can get emotionally involved, which he had always resisted as it may have affected his judgement. The "new" side to Parker merely cemented his reputation as the toughest antihero in crime fiction. If you read this book you will read the rest of the series. In a lifetime of reading books this is the only series I continue to come back to. After writing this Stark could not "find the voice" for nearly twenty years. Thankfully this is not the last Parker, but if it had been I'm sure the author would have been justifiably proud to have ended on this high note.

When the mob holds his friend hostage, and they send him a finger , Parker goes after them with a fierce revenge. This is the best book of the parker series I have read to date.