Firebreak
 Richard Stark
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Warner Books
  ISBN: 0892967110


When Parker hears the phone ringing in his kitchen, he puts down the body of the man sent to kill him & hurries from the garage to answer the phone that Claire offers him. Now he has two jobs to do; first to dispose of the body & then to case the Montana lodge basement of a dot.com billionaire in which resides a horde of stolen art treasures.

Now that Parker's hideout by the lake has been discovered, it is worthless & he must hurry his beloved off to safer places while he takes on the persona of the guy he just killed, & heads for the deadman's haunts in Chicago on his way out to Montana.

Out near the Western town of Chinook, Parker meets up with the crew who are planning on robbing the billionaire's estate. It is heavily guarded with the latest electronics, & a handpicked staff of anonymous guards only one step on the right side of the law.

It's not the gold-plated faucets Parker's gang is out to burgle, it's the contents of a false basement no one else seems to know about. The prize of unregistered stolen paintings is what draws this strange band of lawbreakers together, & to get around all the computerized alarms systems, they've taken on board a whiz kid fresh out of the slammer, who has a temper & a parole problem.

Richard Stark, aka Donald E. Westlake, has a delightful, in-your-face & breathless writing style. He doesn't give you any extra information as to who anyone is, or any time to worry about dead bodies, because his anti-hero Parker will easily & quite reasonably figure it all out.

What I like about this noir crime author is all the other clues salted within the text that are just for the readers' palette. You won't pick them up if you've not read any of his other books by whichever name he uses, yet each of his books stands alone.

Just a pleasant evening's mystery read!

More from Richard Stark: Comeback & Backflash. His first novel The Hunter, became the classic 1967 movie Point Blank, which, 30 years later, was adapted again by Hollywood into the Mel Gibson hit, Payback. Richard Stark is also known as the mystery Grand Master Donald E. Westlake.
(05/19/02)

Rebecca