The Handle, by Richard Stark

(pb; 1966, 2009: eighth novel in the Parker series.  Also published under the title Run Lethal.  Foreword by Luc Sante.)


From the back cover:

"In The Handle, Parker is enlisted by the mob to knock off an island casino guarded by speedboats and heavies, forty miles from the Texas coast."  Not only that, he must shake of the Feds, who have been monitoring that island casino.
 

Review:

Six weeks after the bloody craziness of The Seventh, Parker is back in business, plotting an island heist job at the request of Walter Karns, the Outfit boss who indirectly helped Parker in The Outfit.  One of Parker's active associates in his current endeavor is Alan Grofeld (last seen in The Score), happily married to that Mary, that "telephone girl" who forsook her Nebraska hometown to run off with one of the bandits who robbed it.

Like the preceding Parker novels, Handle is short, sharp, lean and pulp-icy in tone.  Also, like the aforementioned works, it's excellent in its execution - that is to say, worth owning. 

Followed by The Rare Coin Score.