Jayakrishnan's Reviews > The Mourner

I finished this book last month but forgot to update it on Goodreads.

The Mourner is different from the first three parker novels. It has less of Parker and gives more space to a supporting character. August Menlo, is as prominent a character as Parker. Menlo was part of the secret police in a communist Eastern European country and is in America to assasinate a defector and retrieve stolen money from him. Parker gets embroiled with Menlo after he is assigned a job to steal a valuable statue called the Mourner (by femme fatale Bett Harrow's collector father) which is with the defector. My guess is that Stark got interested in world politics while writing this novel.

Much of the book is about the Eastern European Menlo's observations and awareness about American society. The Menlo character was interesting but I prefer it when Parker is at the center of the novel. Parker is absent for much of this novel when Menlo is on the run after shooting Parker and Parker's friend Handy.

Parker as always does not like to have sex when he is planning a heist. Was Richard Stark into all that semen retention stuff or something, lol? Parker likes to jump into bed with a woman only after the job is done.

The scene were Bett Harrow's father tries to give an uninterested and fiercely pragmatic Parker a history lesson about The Mourner statue was quite funny. Overall, I did not like The Mourner as much as the first three Parker novels mainly because there was too much of August Menlo and less of Parker.