The coldblooded criminal known as Parker tries, and fails, to stay under the radar in rural New England: “Nobody does the noir thriller better than Stark.” —San Diego Union-Tribune In Ask the Parrot, the followup to Nobody Runs Forever, ruthless thief Parker is back on the run, dodging dogs, cops, and even a helicopter. His escape brings him to rural Massachusetts, where he is forced to work with a small-town recluse nursing a grudge against the racetrack that fired him. Even in hiding, Parker manages to get up to no good. It’ll be a deadly day at the races . . . “Richard Stark’s Parker crime novels are the ultimate page-turners.” —Jonathan Ames, The Boston Globe “Parker is a blunt instrument of a human being.” —John Hodgman, Parade “Often funny, laced with Stark’s brutally morbid humor . . . fast-moving, tense scenes that drip with potential violence before, inevitably, exploding into actual violence.” —Christopher Bahn, AV Club

Parker, a professional thief, is on the run after a country town bank robbery goes wrong. There are road blocks everywhere and search parties with bloodhounds are in the woods. As they close in on Parker he is confronted by a local with a shotgun. But this citizen is not out to arrest him; he wants Parker to help him with his own nefarious plans. So Parker enters into a queasy partnership with an embittered recluse, whose only companion is a speechless parrot, and finds himself joining the posse looking for him! Ask The Parrot is a masterpiece of lean writing and tight plotting, the latest in Richard Stark's Parker series which has won him a universal following.

Even Parker makes mistakes. Locked up in a prison from which no one has ever escaped, it's only a matter of time before the law uncovers his real name - and his extensive criminal past. To get out, Parker must take on the only accomplices he can find - yet his fellow convicts demand a price: help with another job. Their plan has too many weak links. And Parker isn't a man who likes complications. But with a big potential payoff and no other options, Parker is willing to chance it, just this once.

Together at last. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake, one of the greats of crime fiction, wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hard-boiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists and a code all his own. With the publication of the last four Parker novels Westlake wrote-Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, and Dirty Money-the University of Chicago Press pulls the ultimate score: for the first time ever, the entire Parker series will be available from a single publisher. Nobody Runs Forever opens a three-part saga with a job at a poker game that sours into a necktie party. When Parker goes in on a messy scam-stealing an armored car-with someone he barely knows, as usual the amateurs get in the way of the job. Featuring new forewords by Chris Holm, Duane Swierczynski, and Laura Lippman-celebrated crime writers, all-these masterworks of noir are the capstone to an extraordinary literary run that will leave you craving more. Written over the course of fifty years, the Parker novels are pure artistry, adrenaline, and logic both brutal and brilliant. Join Parker on his jobs and read them all again or for the first time. But don't talk to the law.

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

In The Handle, Parker is enlisted by the mob to knock off an island casino guarded by speedboats and heavies, forty miles from the Texas coast. With double-crosses and double-dealings from the word go, Parker knows the line between success and failure on this score would be exactly the length of the barrel of a .38.

An account of the work of two ornithologists in the Peruvian rainforest.