Customer Reviews

Sour Lemon Score (Atlantic Large Print Books)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The robbery of an armored truck goes fine, but the loot is less than expected. One of the robbers decides that he wants the whole pot and tries to kill his partners -- but Parker gets away. Since he had never worked with the heister before, Parker has to chase down many loose ends to locate his money and gain his revenge.

Parker is not at his most ruthless in this one. In fact, he even demonstrates some compassion in one excellent, interesting scene. This Parker story really kept me going. It's brief and the pages speed by. There is more sex in the story than usual, but it's tasteful and very well written. Be sure to add this one to your Parker collection.

Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) wrote a different Parker in the Sour Lemon Score. Usually in a Parker novel, we read about the idea for a job, the gathering of a team, and the plan for accomplishing a dangerous task. Sour Lemon Score, begins with the execution of a robbery of an armored car and bank, and follows the adventures of team members in post robbery activities.

The bank robbery goes off without a hitch, except the newest team member, Uhl, became nervous. The escape to a safe house is flawless. Then all hell breaks loose.

Uhl wants the entire catch and attempts to kill the other members of the team and get away with all the loot. Parker, avoids Uhl long enough to escape the trap. Then a fascinating manhunt begins with Parker the hunter and Uhl the game.

Parker is one of the best anti heroes in literature. He is a criminal and sometimes violent. He steals and kills and appears self centered. Somehow we cheer for him anyway. Parker is a master planner and an extraordinary leader of crime teams. Parker's plans are brilliant and his execution effective. Something, however, always goes wrong and Parker frequently needs to clean up after some person or random event interferes. In The Sour Lemon Score, the unexpected problem is Uhl, and Parker knows he must put things right.

The Sour Lemon Score is an excellent novel. For me. this is not the best of the Parker series as I prefer those where we observe Parker building a plan. But this text is still a superior book I recommend this story for anyone who likes crime drama.

Twelfth novel in Donald E Westlake's (a.k.a. Richard Stark) sensational Parker series, The Sour Lemon Score is pure vengeance novel. Parker's part of a four man criminal gang who rob a crate of money being carried from a bank's vault to an armoured car outside. Heist goes smoothly, even with a panicking member. Unfortunately that panicking member of the group, George Uhl, brought along his own plans to murder the other three at the isolated farmhouse where they were to lay low until the heat died down, and take all the cash for himself. Of course as the main character of this series Parker narrowly escapes with his life, but he's in for a long hungry wait and walk until he can escape the area and likelihood of arrest. This of course contributes to the anger and desire for revenge on Uhl, and to get his money back. Problem for Parker though is that since Uhl was pretty much a rookie, and brought in by a dead member of the group, it's not going to be easy to track him down, so Parker's going to have to do a lot of legwork, and make a few people unhappy along the way.

The Sour Lemon Score has a lot of action, and lot of inside the head reasoning and thought patterns of Parker and also uses a lot of nice nostalgia references to really illustrate the time it is set in (it was originally published 1969). Such as a radio voice saying the old "this just in" line before reporting on the robbery. A gun dealer asking Parker if he'd like string put around the boxes containing guns he'd bought (like we're asked if you'd like a bag today). During the initial robbery one of the criminals yelling 'stick em up" and the victims not even laughing one bit at the line. Parker makes a few stupid mistakes that maybe he wouldn't make in other books in this series, a lot coming from him being rather impatient at times such as not wanting to wait a few hours for a go between to return to his store. You do also wonder why he wasn't just shot and killed in one scene as later in the book that character admits he has no qualms with murder and the alternative is a lot less convenient than simple murder, plus they'd know Parker will just come back for revenge. Without these things the enjoyable plot wouldn't work though.

Next novel in the series is Deadly Edge.

this book is as amazing as all the other parker novels up to this point. they rob a bank, things go wrong, parker is in full swing being awesome as always. then the last page ruins it, hard. *********spoiler alert, not a huge one, i don't give away any plot critical details, i just rip on a final decision of parkers********

this guy killed both of parkers partners, tried to kill parker, and stole his money. near the end of the book parker has drugged the guy and is taking him out into a swamp to kill him. then, because the guy seems helpless because of the drug, parker lets him live!!! parker up to this point has not let a single person who has wronged him live. that's one of the refreshing things about him. in so many books and movies the main character can't take out the people he needs to, even when they are evil, because he has a heart. the whole point of parker is that he does not have a big squishy heart that feels bad for everyone! he is a tough, cold person who does what needs to be done. that ruined this book for me and put in in the same class as many other generic stories where the anti hero has a heart of gold even though he lives on the wrong side of the law.

don't worry though, i read almost all of the come back stories written in the 90's and 2000's and he is as cold as ever. almost too cold at points. at one point he kills a guy who was tortured into giving up information that hurt parker! that's super cold! it actually made me sad because it wasn't the guys fault. but that's parker! not some wimp who can't kill a guy who has tried to kill him over and over and will try again in the future!!! that makes no sense. even a police officer wouldn't let someone go free who had tried to kill them ten times over two weeks! they would either kill them or lock them up and throw away the key!

Amazon has the annoying habit of listing the name of the "hot" forward author ahead of the actual author. If you are looking at various lists, you see "by Denis Lehaine" . Even on the actual book page, Lahane is listed first. That is just wrong and disrespectful. A cheap marketing trick.

A Half Dozen More Heist Books from Richard Stark

SunPost Weekly August 5, 2010 | John Hood

[...]

Gotta luv the folks at University of Chicago Press. Not only have they decided to bring back Richard Stark¡¯s belovedly badass Parker novels, but they¡¯ve been doing so in sequence, with a niftily packed series that smacks back to the ¡¯60s beginning and ¡ª Zeus-willing ¡ª won¡¯t let up till its 21st century end.

The beginning, for those few who don¡¯t know, was The Hunter (1962), which was reissued two years ago alongside the next eight in the long and lauded run. It was no happy accident that the initial nine reprints coincided with the author¡¯s death. (Stark, nee Donald E. Westlake, died on New Year¡¯s Eve 2008). What was a happy accident though, as John McNally so helpfully pointed out in a Summer ¡¯09 Virginia Quarterly Review piece on Parker called ¡°A Stark World¡±, is the series itself, which simply began as a way for Westlake to publish more books.

As Westlake told Charles L. P. Silet in a 1996 interview:

¡°[T]here¡¯s always been a belief in publishing that [a publisher] can¡¯t publish more than one book a year from any one author. So I thought it would be interesting to have a pen name¡­ to aim for a paperback original this time. So I did this book with the assumption that the bad guy has to get caught at the end . . . I sent [The Hunter] to Bucklin Moon at Pocket Books, who said, ¡®I like this book and I like this character. Is there any way you could change the book so that he would escape at the end and then you could give me three books a year about him.¡¯ And I said, ¡®I think so.¡¯¡±

Within two years Westlake, writing as Stark, would have three Parker novels in the pulp paperback racks. And by the time he was finished there¡¯d be a total of twenty three. And while 23 books in 46 years might not sound like a whole helluva lot, remember Westlake was writing Parker as a sideline, and in addition to his Dortmunder series of capers (14 novels, beginning with 1970¡äs The Hot Rock), he left behind over 100 novels.

But we¡¯re here to talk about Parker, the stoic, merciless, heist man. And it is Parker to whom pulpdom owes its love of bad guy heroes.

Or anti-heroes. Okay, so Jim Thompson did that bad-guy-as-hero thing before Westlake (or Stark) or anyone else. But as McNally also points out, though Thompson¡±took darkness to new depths, [he] used humor to offset the bleakness surrounding his characters¡¯ lives.¡±

Not so Parker. In fact if there¡¯s one instance where the man even smiles, I don¡¯t remember it. And laugh? Forget about it. Though some of the hurdles he and his ¡°string¡± have to heave over during the course of their various heists would be incredibly comic if they weren¡¯t so damn absurd.

Then again when the heists are as daring as those Parker and his crew undertake, absurdity is pretty much a given.

Take The Seventh (1966) and its robbing of a college football game¡¯s game day take. Or take The Handle (¡¯66) and its knocking off of an entire island casino. Or take The Score (¡¯64), where he and his endeavor to rob an entire town. Each begins as a brilliant plan. And each descends into a whirlwind of violence and vengeance. And through them all, Parker remains, resolute and ever ready to do whatever is required, without a hint of hesitation.

The six-pack of kickass that most recently racked consists of The Green Eagle Score (¡¯67), The Black Ice Score (¡¯68) and The Sour Lemon Score (¡¯69), as well as Deadly Edge (¡¯71), Slayground (¡¯71) and Plunder Squad (¡¯72). As you might suspect from their titles, the first three are pretty much straightforwardly crooked heist stories (the targets are, respectively, an Air Force base, an African nation¡¯s treasures, and a bank). But not one heist goes off the way they were intended, and Parker is left to pick up ¡ª and often eliminate ¡ª the pieces.

Deadly Edge, too, is a heist story, and the rock concert Parker and company knock off gives it a decidedly different beat. In Plunder Squad Parker goes head-to-head with a former accomplice who soured things in The Sour Lemon Score and it¡¯s got the giddy undercurrent of payback written right through it. Slayground, in contrast, finds Parker caught in an amusement park after knocking off an armored car, and the mobsters and cops who want what he¡¯s got never get know what hits them, even as it ¡ª and him ¡ª stares them down in the face.

Any one of the above is a worthy romp through a remarkably different America, when crime was crime and criminals took some pride in its commission. And any one of the above will leave you itchy for more. Best though would be to begin at the beginning with The Hunter, so you can see just how circumstances created the man Parker would come to be. But whether you decide to hop on at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, you¡¯re gonnawanna hold on. Because the Parker series doesn¡¯t come with seat belts or safety nets, and it¡¯s very easy to be thrown from this kinda wild ride.

BTW: If you dig this series ¡ª and you will, trust me ¡ª Hard Case Crime also has a buncha Stark/Westlake titles to choose from, including Lemons Never Lie (with Parker¡¯s occasional sidekick, Alan Grofield) and The Cutie (Westlake¡¯s debut, which was originally published as The Mercenaries).

Every Parker novel is a five-star read: lean, propulsive, nasty. Parker makes a plan and goes after his goal, and nothing gets in his way. Here, though, there's an uncharacteristic deviation that is really memorable for fans of the series. Yes, we've seen Parker somewhat humanized by his lover (in the later stories), Claire. But his behavior in a late scene in "Sour Lemon" is really a one-off. Read it and see.

I read all the Parkers about every 6 or 7 years. I've read my favorites (Slayground, Deadly Edge, Green Eagle, Plunder Squad, Butcher's Moon) many, many times. They never get old, and Stark's stark writing never loses its deadly edge.

Wanna be a writer? Read Stark and learn how.

Richard Stark's "Parker" novels are the gold standard of hard-boiled action writing. While each of the novels is of almost uniform excellence, this remains one I reread (and have had to repurchase.) In this case, Parker finds that when things look sour they are sour and that they stay sour, just as he suspected would happen. Plot wise, this is a tour-de-force of "single effect," with the writing lean and the pacing taut. The book is neither shorter nor longer than it needs to be, but as with all the "Parker" novels, it reads fast and it seems to be over too soon. I highly recommend it.

The great Donald Westlake alias Stark always hard to put his work down once you start ......love it.......Marita