The first few lines of Ask the Parrot parachute the reader into the middle of a manhunt in the backwoods of New England—and into the life of an incredibly dangerous man.
Parker, as Richard Stark (the dark avatar of Columbia County mystery grandmaster Donald E. Westlake) christened his antihero many years ago, is fleeing a violent bank robbery. One of his co-conspirators has already been caught. Parker is running out of chances when he meets Tom Lindahl.
Lindahl is a hermit and embittered idealist, with an ulterior motive for hunting a bank robber: He would really, really like to meet one. Actually, he’d like to hire one, more or less. Ever the opportunist, Parker sees Lindahl’s criminal yearnings as a path through the maze of being a wanted man in the 21st century, when criminals face formidable high-tech odds and very few manage to dodge the long arm of the law for long. Stonehearted and stonefaced even by noir thriller standards, Parker assesses Lindahl’s dream of the perfect crime to see what he can take.
The devil, as we all know, is in the details. The reaction of ordinary citizens in the midst of a pervasive aura of do-or-die violence mainly reveals that there is no such thing as an ordinary citizen.
Nor is Parker any ordinary criminal—not that those exist either. Calculating, always calculating, he convinces Lindahl that their only hope is to join forces with the posses searching for the bank robbers. In the process, a fellow searcher—a comparatively noncriminal soul—goes a bit wild and winds up murdering a complete innocent. This event has one meaning for Parker, another for Lindahl, and yet another for the perp.
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