The Man With The Getaway Face by Richard Stark
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Parker is a bad man. So, shouldn't I feel bad for rooting for him?.....NAH!
Cold-blooded crook in the first degree, Parker has just undergone a necessary face change when he is drawn into a heist for the quick cash prospect. Of course, once he gets the real details of the job he discovers his take won't be a fraction of what he thought it was. And that's not even the bad part about it! But hell, he goes along with it anyway, and I'm glad he did. Otherwise it wouldn't have been much of a book...
In this, the second book in the series, our "hero" doesn't come off as quite so psychotic. It's a little easier to pull for a guy who isn't torturing women. He's far from lovable, but at least he isn't almost completely repellent like I felt he was in book one.
There's a side story to The Man With The Getaway Face that drags a little bit. Mainly it's slow because the side character is slow, as in stupid. One too many knocks to the head have left him dimwitted. That's fine, but having to follow a character who doesn't understand what's going on means as a reader you are forced to endure repetition or long, drawn out passages in which you know exactly what's going on and where it's going. This gets boring real quick.
All in all though, this was a solid read at just the right length for this kind of mean-spirited stuff. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with these dickholes and twatwads, so I'm glad author Richard Stark kept it short.
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