Then one day he'd had enough and he split and tried to disappear into a normal, suburban, middle-class life in Ohio, married to a woman named Nancy.

But his old boss, a sadistic true-crime nut with a fish tank of man-eating piranhas (I know, not a real thing), finds him and drags him back to New York for what should be the ultimate heist: a bank is changing locations, which means that the entire contents of the bank will be loaded onto trucks and driven to the new spot.

The mission: steal the bank.

Shelby doesn't want to be there and doesn't think it's possible.

He does hook up with Vikki again, even though he left her in the lurch kind of badly years ago. And some of the other gangsters in the syndicate don't like Frank too well.

But where there's a will, there's a way. This was a great, well paced heist thriller with lots of atmopshere and nice touches.

Shelby seems like a typically doomed criminal hero in a fatalistic scenario but this is also around the time that the conventions of the genre started to change, leading to a series of Richard Stark "Parker" books instead of just one that had Parker arrested or killed at the end.

So there are a few surprises and it's a lot of fun to read.

The first line is "Later he would think of this day and make of each swift second—each swift, normal, humdrum second—a separate memory".