The Damsel

Escaping from the pages of the master crime writer’s acclaimed Parker novels, a fast-talking actor-thief has an adventure of his own across Mexico.   For years now, stage actor Alan Grofield has supported his craft with side gigs in the underworld, including a few dangerous heists with a ruthless criminal named Parker. After their last scheme, Grofield finds himself stranded in Mexico with a bullet wound and a bag of cash. And then things start to get interesting—when he watches a young woman climbing into his fifth-floor hotel window.   It turns out Elly Fitzgerald has a taste for trouble to match Grofield’s penchant for finding it. When the hoods she’s running from catch up to her, she and Grofield set out on an action-packed road trip from Mexico City to Acapulco, hoping to stop an assassination along the way. The first Alan Grofield novel by crime fiction master Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark, The Damsel is full of wit, adrenaline, and political intrigue.   This edition includes a new foreword by Sarah Weinman.