Scott's Reviews > The Mourner

"Shall I shout for help?" -- Kapoor, staring down the barrel of Parker's purloined pistol

"You won't shout twice. Move it." -- Parker, simply not messing around, on page 177

Hot on the heels of The Outfit - including some of the same shady supporting characters, and a few occasional call-backs to that novel's pulp fiction plot - comes the terse fourth Parker crime drama The Mourner. It amusingly begins in a similar way - with our protagonist avoiding being murdered in his hotel room - and quickly Parker is reconnecting with Bett Harrow, the slinkily duplicitous dame from the early chapters of said previous book, and being hired by her to snatch a valuable statue from a foreign diplomat's guarded home in the D.C. suburbs. Of course, the needless complications soon ensue - best exemplified by a corrupt and untrustworthy security operative from a (fictional) Eastern European nation - but Parker is determined to complete this heist for its sizable fee. While I wasn't a fan of Parker disappearing from the action for an extended time late in the story - although for understandable reasons, given his unexpected physical condition (cough cough)- and the focus shifting solely to the stodgy security operative, this was still a solid early 60's-era paperback.