Book Review: Richard Stark, Dirty Money (2008)

The final Parker novel, Dirty Money, is good in the ways that all Parker novels are good, but there is nothing otherwise remarkable about it. It picks up right where the previous Parker novel leaves off: Our antihero wants to retrieve the $2 million dollars that his gang left hidden at the end of Ask the Parrot. He wants this money even though he knows that it is marked and therefore useless in the United States. This is a desperate Parker, running low on cash and working without I.D. Thus, his larger goal in the novel is to become a fully functional Parker again, flush and not fearful of an ordinary traffic stop. When Parker achieves this goal, however, the victory feels unavoidably sad, and I’m not too noir to admit it: I felt choked up at the end, sentimental about the exit of a character whose great charm is that he never feels sentimental. Grade: B-