Breakout, by Richard Stark

Parker is caught when a break-in goes wrong and knows that it won't be long before his past is uncovered and he faces trial for a whole lot more than just a bungled warehouse robbery. So he determines to break out of the prison, but to do this he'll need to ally himself with a couple of other prisoners, and they've got some ideas about what they should do together when they get out.

This is a pretty recent (2002) addition to the Parker series: when I read the first one I thought it would be hard to sustain the pace for many more books, and I think this may be showing the limitations of the character a bit. Not that it wasn't a good read, but you get the feeling that Stark is perhaps having to try a bit too hard to come up with plotlines. And although Parker is still pretty amoral, he's not quite so compelling a character in this book.

But it was a good story, and the writing was strong, albeit not up to Elmore Leonard's standards (despite what the blurb says). So I will definitely read more in the series, but perhaps I'll go back to some of the earlier ones (it doesn't seem to matter a lot what order you read them).

Completed : 12-Aug-2008

[nickoh] [2008 books] [books homepage]