Books: The Sour Lemon Score By Richard Stark (1969)

 

"Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name’s Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who begins to pick off his fellow hoisters, one by one. The first mistake? That he doesn’t begin things by putting a bullet in Parker. That means he won’t get the chance to make a second."

For the twelfth novel in the Parker series, Richard Stark upends the formula (somewhat) a bit, by opening the story mid-heist, with Parker being part of a four-man team that is executing a bank robbery during an armored car delivery (this seems pretty basic for Parker, who seems to go after bigger fish,but once a thief always a thief, I guess). As described, things go sour when Uhl goes rogue. But Parker, who is alive because he’s resourceful, eventually gets on the trail of Uhl, one that leads up and down the Eastern seaboard. The Sour Lemon Score, the mid-way point of the series and the last Parker/Westlake via Gold Medal Publishing, is still a fine thriller, even if basic outline follows the previous eleven books. This one jettisons the part two of the book, which is usually the flashback to how things were set up, while the third part is usually the one where we see the POV of the other characters. But while the structure remains clear, this is a more linear story and thus much more fun, even if there are no killings, no sex, and few plot points left dangling (I’m thinking some of these will be revisited?).