"With his old scores now settled, Parker's
living the good life... until a snitch rats him out to The Outfit for the
bounty on his head. Now, he's no longer living in swank hotels and enjoying the
finer things, and someone has to pay for that. The Outfit's about to learn, if
you push Parker, it better be all the way into the grave. Still, these guys are
organized crime with a capital O. They are big. They are bad. They were brutal.
And no crook ever crossed them and lived to enjoy it. Except Parker. So they
wanted Parked dead, and a hitman proved they meant business. Too bad for The
Outfit he missed. Because Parker planned to get even -dead even. 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. Hard for anyone but Parker -because the
entire underworld knew it was written in blood: whatever Parker did, he did
deadly”
The Outfit is set three months after
the events of The Man with the Getaway Face and action gets going from page
one. And much like the previous two, Stark/Westlake
delivers the goods with fast-paced action, minimum words, and pace that makes
you speed through the adventure –no words seem wasted here. By far the best part of the book is
the meticulously crafting that went into the various robberies that occur –somehow
each is fresh and different (something Westlake excels at and continued on with
his Dortmunder tales). Again, even those these books are short and never to be
considered high literature, there is an elegance to them and really offer some fine entertainment.
This is the best of three so far, and
seemly concludes an arc. There are 21 more books to go in this series, so we’ll see if Parker has
more run-ins with The Outfit.
There was a 1973 film version of this book that starred Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don
Baker, and Joanna Cassidy. It was released on DVD about a decade ago, via WarnerBros.com's manufacture-on-demand site -however it's no longer listed there.
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