The Blackbird, Donald E. Westlake
The Blackbird, Donald E. Westlake
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

The Blackbird

Author: Donald E. Westlake

Narrator: R. C. Bray

Unabridged: 5 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/01/2013

Synopsis

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames. Not that there isn't violence and adventure aplenty… The third Grofield novel, The Blackbird shares its first chapter with Slayground: after a traumatic car crash, Parker eludes the police, but Grofield gets caught. Lying injured in the hospital, Grofield is visited by G-Men who offer him an alternative to jail, and he finds himself forced into a deadly situation involving international criminals and a political conspiracy.

About Donald E. Westlake

Richard Stark (1933–2008), wrote dozens of novels under his own name and a rainbow of other pseudonyms. Many of his books have been adapted for film, most notably The Hunter, which became the 1967 noir Point Blank and the 1999 smash Payback.

About R. C. Bray

R. C. Bray is an award-winning audiobook narrator with over 180 titles to his credit. Besides winning five AudioFile Earphones Awards, he won the prestigious Audie Award in 2015 for Best Science Fiction Narration and has been an Audie Award finalist seven times. He has been a finalist for the Voice Arts Award, and in 2014, his narration earned a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award. He is also an accomplished producer and voice-over artist, and his voice can be heard in countless TV and radio commercials.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave on February 05, 2021

Donald E. Westlake, writing under the pseudonym of Richard Stark, wrote 24 novels with the tight-lipped tough guy Parker as his main character. The challenge for a fiction writer in having a main character who doesn’t like to talk is that stories can get a bit too much stripped down to action. So wh......more

Goodreads review by James on December 23, 2024

As virtually all crime fiction fans know, "Richard Stark" was one of the several pseudonyms used by the prolific author, Donald Westlake. Writing as Stark, he was best known for his series featuring the amoral criminal known as Parker which ultimately ran to twenty-four novels. As Stark, Westlake al......more

Goodreads review by Jim on October 29, 2016

This starts with the same incident as Slayground, the 14th Parker book. Parker gets away & deals with his issues. Grofield winds up dealing with his own in this book & damn, but he deals. It was neat the way Stark worked him into international espionage since that's about the last situation anyone w......more

Goodreads review by K on August 24, 2017

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter substance that influences our sensation of pleasure, among other things. The Blackbird, by Richard Stark (a pseudonym used by Donald Westlake), offers up its literary equivalent-- generating sensations of pleasure with each fast-moving chapter. Featuring Alan Grofield,......more

Goodreads review by F.R. on April 23, 2018

Apparently, Richard Stark used the Grofield novels to experiment with different types of stories. Whereas his justly famous Parker novels all follow exactly the same brutal format, these spin-offs were looser and more playful. A way for Stark to try new things and have fun doing it. Sharing pretty mu......more

Quotes

“Never before has Grofield gone for so many rides with someone else at the wheel.” New York Times

“Stark presents his nonhero Alan Grofield as a highly reluctant almost-hero in [this book] and the wryly humorous role fits him well.” New York Times Book Review

“A pleasure…[Stark]’s ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre.” Publishers Weekly

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