The Sour Lemon Score

Richard Stark's The Sour Lemon Score involves a successful bank robbery that goes bad, as one of the accomplices turns on Parker and his co-conspirators. The plot is very good — Stark maintains a high level of intensity for the entire novel — but Parker’s use of truth serum to get answers is one of a few implausible scenes. Nonetheless, the book includes perhaps the best description yet of Parker’s personal philosophy: “Parker didn't believe in luck, good or bad. He believed in nothing but men who knew their job and did it.”