The fifth Parker novel has the main character planning a score that involves a dozen professional crooks ready to take over a rich, remote North Dakota town.

The good guys in a new African nation were missing a treasury full of diamonds. The nation's corrupt leader had stashed the rocks somewhere in New York City. Now the good guys needed a specialist to get their diamonds back. So they came to the best in the business: Parker. Only the three mysterious tough guys came to Parker, too. They figured three hands filled with .38's could convince him to pass up this international gem game. But leaning on Parker...

Parker agrees to take part in the nearly half-million dollar robbery of a Christian crusade, having been given inside help by a disgruntled worker in the Rev. William Archibald's camp, but things start to go wrong when one of the trio of robbers decides he wants to keep all the money for himself.

"Parker calmly tosses a firebomb through a plate-glass window, while some newfound partners in crime take down a nearby bank. Making their getaway in the confusion, the bank robbers tell him two things: that this heist was only seed money for a much gaudier one, and that Parker has to loan them his share of the take. They should have given him his cut, or killed him. Because now Parker is rampaging through the American South, taking on a new identity...

The coldblooded criminal known as Parker tries, and fails, to stay under the radar in rural New England: "Nobody does the noir thriller better than Stark." -San Diego Union-Tribune In Ask the Parrot, the followup to Nobody Runs Forever, ruthless thief Parker is back on the run, dodging dogs, cops, and even a helicopter. His escape brings him to rural Massachusetts, where he is forced to work with a small-town recluse nursing a grudge against the...