Deadly Edge

Parker and a crew of three others pull off a near-flawless theft of gate receipts for a cash-only rock concert.  However, when they arrive at the prearranged hiding spot to wait out the heat, they discover the body of a fifth man who was originally going to participate in the robbery and backed out at the last minute. 

Baffled but not knowing what to do, the crew splits the take and go its separate ways.  Parker goes to Claire, who has recently bought a house in hopes of restoring some semblance of normalcy to her life.  However, the other members of the crew start turning up dead, and as Parker leaves Claire to figure out what is going on, it turns out that the unknown killers may be able to figure out where Claire lives despite all the precautions she and Parker have taken...

Deadly Edge falls somewhere in the lower middle of the Parker canon.  While it isn't the stunner the best books in the series are, it isn't flawed in the way the weakest books in the series are.  The plot is a good one, and keeps the reader puzzled until such time as Stark chooses to explain what is going on.  On the other hand, the plot may suffer from being a bit too thin.  It sometimes feels like this is a short story stretched into novel length. 

The book's principle weakness is its reliance on Claire being endangered to advance the plot.  The problem with this is that Claire is simply not well-developed enough (in this novel, not series-wide) to elicit much sympathy--the reader could be forgiven for simply not caring whether she gets offed or not.  While this plot device isn't nearly as annoying as it was in the substandard The Black Ice Score, it also isn't nearly as compelling as it was in the superior The Rare Coin Score, where the reader cared more about Claire than Parker did.

The book does have several things to recommend it, though.  Claire devises quite a clever scheme to avoid being raped, and this sequence is a highlight of the novel.  The mystery of how all of the principles in an airtight plan are somehow being killed by an unknown outside party is resolved in a plausible and original manner.  And Parker's relationship to Claire has been freed of the out-of-character aspects it took on in The Black Ice Score.  A decent book, but not a classic.

To The Sour Lemon Score, the previous book in the series.

To Slayground, the next book in the series (coming soon).

Back to The Violent World of Parker.