The Handle is the eighth Parker thriller by Richard Stark aka Donald E. Westlake. If you are looking for a fun and easy to read adventure novel, The Handle is great.
Richard Stark’s Parker sets up a heist on an island casino off Galveston. He gets a crew together, including summer theatre actor and driver Alan Grofield. He is being financed by Karns who runs an operation the casino is competing with.
Things seem to be going smoothly along until the Feds decide they want it. The owner of the island casino is a man they badly want to arrest but cannot because the island belongs to Cuba. In exchange for letting the heist go along and his freedom Parker agrees to help the Feds capture the owner.
That is when things get more complicated.
The Handle is an action heavy adventure novel with a great character, Parker, and solid secondary characters. The reader never gets bored and always wants to know what will happen or go wrong next.
If you want to know what happens to Alan Grofeld after his adventures with Parker in The Handle, read The Damsel, also by Richard Stark
The Handle aka Run Lethal
Richard Stark
Donald E. Westlake
Originally published 1966
University of Chicago Press 2011
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