Word: parkerisms
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...little incest and crises of identity thrown in. Josh Hamilton plays a troubled fellow who brings home his supremely normal fiancee (Tori Spelling, who's surprisingly good in this sugar-cookie role) only to confront the ghost of his past in his sister, "Jackie O" (a delightfully demented Parker Posey), who sports an obsession with the JFK assassination among her myriad kooky charms. What makes this setup more than just a gimmicky grab-bag for originality is its success in mixing the familiar and the disturbing in the composition of the characters...
...conversation stirs because in his latest crime novel, Comeback (Mysterious Press; 292 pages; $18), Westlake has reached high on his shelf to blow the dust off a memorable badman. About 35 years ago, at the beginning of his career, he turned in a manuscript starring an armed robber named Parker. That was it; if Parker had a first name, you didn't want to get close enough to know it. He was tough, mean and distinctly unfunny; a sullen bad guy who drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes and cuffed both men and women around. Parker got caught...
...then, in 1974, Parker went into a kind of hibernation. "I lost the voice" is how Westlake puts it. That voice, at any rate. He continued to write novels at a brisk trot, winning three Edgar Awards and occasionally lurching cheerfully off track with an unclassifiable detour, like Kahawa, which he claims is Swahili for "We couldn't think of a title." It's a caper tale, set in 1982, darker than Dortmunder, lighter than Parker, about some likable bandits who steal a trainload of coffee from Idi Amin, in Uganda...
...Comeback, the irredeemable badman Parker returns, tougher than ever. His old target was the Mafia (you don't want even a bad-guy hero brutalizing widows and orphans). This time the cash cow is a sleazy televangelist. The holdup goes like grease, netting several garbage bags full of bucks donated by the pious, when suddenly...
...narration is hard and spare, with twitching jaw muscles. It ends at just the right moment, after an accomplice named George has turned treacherous, and Parker has dealt with this matter, and another colleague, who is loyal, asks, "You seen George?" and Parker says merely, "Yes." Cut, fade to black. Another Parker, to be published next year, is in the can, and the first volumes of the series, The Hunter and The Man with the Getaway Face, are due to be reprinted. They deserve to be, though Comeback is a grittier, better book. And the other 14 prehistoric Parkers...