"No one can turn a phrase like Westlake."
Detroit News and Free Press

"A pleasure....Westlake's ability to construct and action story filled with unforeseen twists and
quadruple-crosses is unparalleled."
San Francisco Chronicle

Westlake's novels at

Click on each title to read comments and reviews.

        PROUDLY PRESENTS... God Save the Mark  

                                              Thieves' Dozen (2004)

Money for Nothing   (2003)
   "One of the best Dortmunder novel so far!"

                                              Put a Lid on It         
                         

Bad News  

  SMOKE Due to a foiled burglary in a high-tech lab doing research for cigarette manufacturers,
Freddie Noon, the thief, is now invisible. He uses his invisibility to escape the doctors and to make big scores in
diamond and fur heists, but he soon discovers that being invisible is straining his relationship with Peg, his charming
significant other.
Meanwhile, a hilariously malevolent tobacco tycoon hatches a plan to subvert the Human Genome Project for the
good of the tobacco industry...

Payback (The Hunter) (A Parker novel)

Parker, cold-blooded professional thief in New York, is featured in: The Hunter (British: Point Blank),
The Man with the Getaway Face (1963) (British: The Steel Hit), The Outfit (1963), The Mourner (1963),
The Score [incl Grofield] (1964), The Jugger (1965), The Seventh (1966), The Handle [incl Grofield] (1966),
The Rare Coin Score (1967), The Green Eagle Score (1967), The Black Ice Score (1968), The Sour Lemon Score (1969),
Deadly Edge (1971), Slayground (1971), Plunder Squad (1972), Butcher's Moon [incl Grofield] (1974),
Comeback (1997) (Written as Richard Stark)

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said
"screw you, buddy", yanked his Chevy back in to the stream of traffic and roared on down to the
tollbooths. Parker spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked accross the
George Washington bridge...

PITY_HIM_ AFTERWARDS ....

The Mitch Tobin series (by Tucker Coe aka D. E. Westlake): Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966)
Murder Among Children (1967) Wax Apple (1970) A Jade In Aries (1970) Don't Lie To Me (1972)

DON'T _ASK.(A Dortmunder novel)

John Dortmunder, comic thief in New York, is featured in: The Hot Rock (1970), Bank Shot (1972), Jimmy the Kid (1974),
Nobody's Perfect (1977), Why Me? (1983), Good Behavior (1986), Drowned Hopes (1990), Don't Ask (1993),
What's the Worst That Could Happen? (1996)

In this caper, Dortmunder is hired to steal the femur of a 16-year-old girl who was canonized because, 800 years ago,
she was killed and eaten by her family. Now two European countries and the Catholic church are fighting like dogs
over the bone. How will this free-for-all end? Don't Ask.

Backflash ('98)

GANGWAY

BANK _SHOT

DANCING _AZTECS From the "master of the rolling scam," here is a hilarious crime caper set in New York.
A hot hustler is searching for a million-dollar Aztec sculpture that is accidentally mixed with cheap plaster copies.
From Harlem to Greenwich, a motley cast chases the lost piece.

THE MERCENARIES (LargePrint Mystery) Donald E. Westlake has many names and sometimes seems to be everywhere
all at once. In the field of crime literature, Westlake has few peers, a legion of admirers, and innumerable imitators.
Since the 1960 publication of his smash debut The Mercenaries, he's written more than 70 novels (40-something under his
own name and dozens more under a gaggle of pseudonyms), including two of the best crime fiction series ever written,
and dozens of one-shot genre-twisting classics.

THE _AX ('97)
Donald E. Westlake, named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, has written everything from comic capers
(the Dortmunder series) to the darker adventures of ace criminal Parker during his long career.
But he's never come up with anything scarier or more timely than this story about a downsized executive
who decides to kill off the competition.

Burke Devore could be your neighbor: a laid-off paper company manager watching his life and family fall apart as he tries desperately to get a job. The plan he finally comes up with involves murdering seven men very much like himself, and
Westlake's most impressive achievement is to make the serial killings understandable if in no way justified.

POINT _BLANK.(A Parker novel)

GOOD_BEHAVIOR

  TWO _MUCH.    MAN cannot live by Proust alone, which is why it is a pleasure to note the publication
of Donald E. Westlake's latest mystery. Nobody would call Mr. Westlake profound, but he is always droll and always
professional, and there are few more agreeable ways to while away a long commute than watching him dream up a half-dozen
unlikely-sounding crooks and put them through their paces.

Like P. G. Wodehouse, a writer whom he resembles rather more than slightly, Mr. Westlake is at his best in his series books:
the Parker novels (written under the tongue-in-cheek pen name Richard Stark), which feature a tungsten-hard professional
burglar who specializes in infallible plans; and the Dortmunder novels, in which the premise of the Parker novels is ingeniously
transplanted to a parallel universe where the not-so-tough guys are forever tripping over their own feet, and the hero's infallible
plans,in a word, aren't. But Mr. Westlake's one-shot comic mysteries, like Wodehouse's non-series farces, are also very much
worth reading. (New York Times)

THE HOOK    (2000)

The Outfit (A Parker novel)

.WHAT'S_THE _WORST_ THAT_ COULD_ HAPPEN? When Max Fairbanks, a vastly wealthy
and powerful magnate, catches John Dortmunder breaking into his Long Island mansion, he thinks he is dealing with some
regular loser. It amuses him to deprive Dortmund of his lucky ring. In Westlake's ingenious and dazzling comic thriller, Fairbanks
lives to regret that gratuitous humiliation. The engaging Dortmund gathers a band of cronies, and exacts revenge at a series
of the rich man's fancy palaces, from a penthouse on Broadway to a fantasy retreat in Las Vegas.

HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER Mr. Künt spent his whole life trying to get revenge
on the people who laughed at him because of his name. Now he is in prison for playing a practical joke and ends up associating
with the toughest elements...

THE_HOT ROCK This is the classic that introduced John Archibald Dortmunder, the thief whose capers never quite come off,
as he and his convict friends plot to steal the fabulous Balaboma Emerald.

.MAN _WITH_ THE_ GETAWAY_ FACE

THE_CURIOUS_ FACTS_ PRECEDING_ MY_ EXECUTION

BABY,_WOULD_ I_ LIE? .Branson, Missouri, is the home of Country Music USA, big hairdos, phony snakeskin boots and the
most scandalous murder trial ever to hit the country music scene. Sara Joslyn and Jack Ingersoll, journalists for a notorious
tabloid, are there as well, to expose every dirty detail. The character development, plot lines, sub-plot lines (and sub-sub
plot lines) all make an absorbing entertaining mix. From the author of Smoke and Trust Me on This.

GOD_SAVE_ THE_ MARK

TRANSYLVANIA _STATION by Donald Westlake, Abby Westlake. Introduction by Stephen King

CASTLE__IN_ THE AIR (Large Print)

THE BLACKBIRD: A_GROFIELD NOVEL

HIGH _ADVENTURE WARNING: Reading Donald Westlake may lead to shortness of breath, prolonged chortles, outbreaks
of hysterical laughter, and sudden, drop-dead surprises.

ADIOS SHEHERAZADE

THE_DAMSEL (A Grofield novel) Alan Grofield, actor and part-time bank robber in New York, is featured in:
The Damsel (1967), The Dame (1969), The Blackbird (1969) and Lemons Never Lie (1971) (Written as Richard Stark)

COPS AND ROBBERS

WHY_ME In Why Me, the low-IQ F.B.I. man Malcolm Zachary utters: ''A third potentialism would be a transactage by a dissident factor within the Turkish populace.'' Agent Zachary says to him: ''Just speak it out in clear and simple terminology.
We have infiltratory specialists, men carefully trained to blend into any environmentalism.''

NOBODY'S_PERFECT

HIGH_JINX (Mohonk Mysteries)

DROWNED_HOPES As criminal masterminds go, John Dortmunder is a low-budget, blue-collar model.
The hero of a cache of comic crime novels by Donald E. Westlake, he is an honest thief eternally besieged by glitches,
goof-ups and catastrophes. Drowned Hopes,' the seventh novel in the Dortmunder series (which began with The Hot Rock),
continues the tradition of glum gentility that has hooked readers from the suburbs to the slammers.

THE_DAME

BROTHERS_KEEPERS

KAHAWA:_THE AFRICAN NOVEL Donald E. Westlake's novels have ranged from sly comedies -- like Baby, Would I Lie? -- to the uniquely uproarious Dortmunder series. But in Kahawa, a lost Westlake gem now
brought back to print, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and multiple Edgar Award winner spins one
of his most extraordinary yarns. Hailed as "a splendid huggermugger" by the New York Times and a
"gigantic caper for all seasons" by Robert Ludlum, Kahawa is a heady brew of politics, sex, power, and of course,
larceny. Big-time larceny in the backwaters of Africa.

TRUST_ME_ ON_ THIS

Trust me on this - Read by Nicki Van Gieson. 8 Audiocassettes.

The HANDLE

I_GAVE AT THE OFFICE

JIMMY_THE_ KID

JUGGER

BUSY_BODY

MYSTERY_FOR_ HALLOWEEN

ENOUGH_(Large Print) If you like one of Mr. Westlake books, you'll probably like them all. Try Enough. It's possibly one of his
best mystery novels.

A_LIKELY _STORY _A Likely Story, a straight piece of humorous writing without a crook or a smuggler in sight, represents
another genre breakthrough for Mr. Westlake. Undoubtedly unnerved by the absence of the author's customary hallmarks,
publishers scurried to get out their rejection letters. (In a recent ad for this book, a publisher who had rejected the manuscript
is quoted as saying, ''Humorous fiction has always been my recipe for small.'')
This saga, about a journeyman writer's feverish efforts to straighten out his byzantine domestic arrangements
- which involve a wife, a live-in companion, a mistress and their sundry offspring, former spouses and mothers -
while simultaneously working on a grandiose book project to finance his complicated affairs does, in truth, cover a very small
subject area.
It happens, however, to be hugely funny.

Mr. Westlake writes in an idiom of controlled comic hysteria of the various domestic muddles that drive the author hero,
Tom Diskant, to his desperately cynical scheme of writing a best- selling Christmas gift book. (''My current
meal ticket,'' he calls the sacred holiday.) While doggedly pursuing Norman Mailer, Joan Rivers and dozens
of other luminaries for ''stray thoughts'' about Christmas for his flippant anthology, Tom struggles to keep
the delicate madness of his household arrangements from flying apart. Despite all his efforts, disaster looms large
during a farcical summer holiday when all the principals converage to share a house on Fire Island.
(New York Times)

The_Fugitive_ Pigeon

LEVINE

LEMONS_NEVER _LIE

SACRED_MONSTER Sacred Monster can be taken as a bookend to Mr. Westlake's Trust Me on This, which delivered
an equally devastating tirade against the supermarket tabloids. Here he steps up from the gutter for a grilling of Jack Pine.
Pine, a globally famous superstar fresh from wrapping a sequel to Gone With the Wind, has agreed to be questioned
by a man he believes represents People magazine. If his judgment is clouded, it's because his body contains more
chemicals and pollutants than the skies over Elizabeth, N.J., and his brain is floating in alcohol. (...)
There will be no hoorays from Hollywood for Sacred Monster, which is why the rest of us should cheer it.
(New York Times)

A Good Story And Other Stories (2000)

The Road to Ruin (2004)
John Archibald Dortmunder's extraordinary come-back!!!

                                                        Click here to see a picture of Donald E. Westlake.
                                                        Or here to see a more recent photograph.