Fin­ished Dirty Money by Richard Stark (aka the late, great Don­ald E. West­lake). This is the lat­est book in his long-running series about thief and anti-hero Parker.

This book picks up where the last one, Nobody Runs For­ever, left off. In that book, Parker and some of his ruth­less asso­ciates stole upwards of $2 mil­lion from an armored car. In Dirty Money, Parker and his fel­low thieves are try­ing to fig­ure out how they can get the money and get away from the police, who are method­i­cally search­ing the Mass­a­chu­setts coun­try­side for the miss­ing money. The usual sorts of com­pli­ca­tions and dou­ble crosses ensue.

I love crime books, and this is one of my favorite series. Parker is one cool cus­tomer, as he demon­strates once again in this book. Even when the cops are breath­ing down his neck, Parker never wavers in his deter­mi­na­tion to get the money and get out of town.

Stark (aka West­lake) died in 2008, so I don’t know if there will be any more books out by him or not. But he’s left read­ers some real trea­sures with the Parker series, along with his Dort­munder comic crime capers (writ­ten under the West­lake name). West­lake and his alter-ego as Stark will be greatly missed by this reader.

Thumbs up.

Up next: With­out Fail by Lee Child.

Books in my TBR pile: About 14.