Pun Salad

This is number 23 in the "Parker" series written by the late Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). For some reason it never came out in paperback, so I got a cheapo used hardcover from Amazon.

For those who don't know: Parker is kind of a bad guy, making a living of taking things that don't belong to him. He operates under his own sociopathic moral code. He is much like a massive neutron star ripping through a solar system. While he's an implacable and unstoppable force of nature, his mere passage through a community can cause violent havoc and consternation in the lives of people he interacts with. And this penultimate episode in the Parker saga is no exception.

The ending of book 22 (Nobody Runs Forever) was a cliffhanger: after a botched armored car robbery, Parker was on the lam in upstate New York, being pursued up a hill by cops and dogs.

As this book opens, he's "rescued" by Tom Lindahl, a loner and loser. (How much of a loser? He owns a parrot that doesn't talk. Until…) Lindahl was fired from the local racetrack years ago after a futile attempt at whistleblowing the corrupt practices there. He sees Parker as a possible accomplice in his revenge, as he's been nurturing a scheme to liberate piles of cash from the track. With the law so close, Parker doesn't have a lot of options. So he gets drawn into Lindahl's scheme.