Also fin­ished The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark, the nom de plume of Don­ald E. West­lake.

The Rare Coin Score is one in a series of books about Parker, a cold, cool thief who does what­ever it takes to get the job done — and who isn’t shy about killing peo­ple who get in his way.

I was really excited to read this book because this is sort of a turn­ing point in the series. Through­out the books, Parker has had no emo­tion­ally attach­ments to any­one — not even to his wife who betrayed him before she killed her­self. But this is the book where he hooks up with Claire, his main squeeze through­out the rest of the series.

The book fol­lows the same pat­tern as the other Parker nov­els. Park­er gets togeth­er with a crew of thieves, this time to rob a coin con­ven­tion. They plan the job, go in to exe­cute it, and things get messed up along the way — which neces­si­tates Parker killing a cou­ple of people.

But the scenes with Claire were what really inter­ested me. Parker is attracted to Claire, and he hooks up with her partly to keep her in line so she’ll keep one of the other crew mem­bers in line. Yet, he does feel some­thing for her, even if it’s only a lit­tle spark of some­thing. At one point, Parker actu­ally con­tem­plates killing her, and the only real rea­son they go off into the sun­set together is that Claire fits in with Parker’s world — not the other way around. Which is com­pletely in keep­ing with his char­ac­ter. You can’t help but root for Parker, even if he is a cold-hearted bastard.

So, thumbs up.