Backflash (Parker Series #18) Book

When Parker takes a boating trip along a river, you know that it's not gonna be a pleasure cruise.

After a narrow escape from his previous robbery, Parker is contacted by a retired government bureaucrat named Cathman who has a proposition. Cathman has the details on a new riverboat casino that is always loaded with cash, and while Parker doesn't much like the idea of pulling a job on a boat, it's too tempting a target to pass up. Parker assembles a top notch crew of thieves to pull off the heist, but he's worried about Cathman's real motives. As always with a Parker story, there are some other monkey wrenches lurking around just waiting to be flung into the works at the worst possible moments.

This is second Parker book that Stark (a/k/a Donald Westlake) wrote a long lay off from 1974 until 1997. While I don't find the second phase of the books quite as strong as the early Parker novels, a weaker Stark is still better than most other crime novels, and this one was particularly fun to re-read. The riverboat heist is a nice change of pace, and as usual there are some clever gimmicks as to how the job gets pulled off. Another aspect I enjoyed was that for a while in the series most of Parker's problems were coming from loose ends that he would leave hanging. In this one, most of the obstacles come from directions he couldn't have reasonably anticipated so he comes across as smarter in this one as well as more ruthless in the way he deals with them.

Something that did strike me funny was the idea that there's a riverboat casino that actually goes up and down a river. When the riverboat fad hit Kansas City in the '90s there was the usual battle between the puritans and the capitalists, and the riverboat compromise was sold as being a way to do gambling with strict limitations. But then the so-called boats were essentially just buildings along the river.

We all played along with the joke for a while. There was a brief period when you actually had to get boarding passes and could only step 'on-board' at certain times with a time limit that meant you had to leave the 'ship'. Most of those rules were tossed out pretty quickly so what we were left with are casinos along the rivers in areas no one goes to except to gamble which pretty much eliminated all the projections of bringing tourism in.

Anyhow, that's why I found the idea of a riverboat casino that actually cruises on a river hilarious. (Are there parts of the country where they actually do this? Anyone got an actual cruising riverboat?) Parker should have just hit one of these KC casinos, and he wouldn't have had to worry about any of that boat nonsense.