A professional thief takes the chance of a lifetime—his biggest score yet—in this tense heist novel set in the heart of contemporary Los Angeles.
After decades of close calls, O’Conner—the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge”—spends most of his time in semi-retirement, running his legitimate businesses and playing pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his wealthy suburb is the wiser to his double-life.
But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay there, and when he is approached with a job he can’t resist, he agrees to mastermind his biggest score yet: a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker, which is hidden underneath his newly constructed basketball arena. As the job goes down, testing O’Conner’s mettle with new challenges, the promise of the score attracts ghosts from his past that he thought were long buried.
Interwoven with flashbacks to O’Conner’s coming-of-age in Southern Los Angeles, this pulse-pounding crime novel is both an homage to Donald Westlake’s Parker series and a rich portrait of a morally gray thief at a crossroads.
Praise for Gary Phillips
“Phillips is a storyteller first . . . The wounds of 1963, and the foreshadowing of both better days and harsher ones, feel unnervingly fresh, and a reminder that progress, much as we wish otherwise, never adheres to a linear timeline.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Excellent . . . Phillips’ descriptions of the utter conflagration that was Watts as well as the mysterious fictional events that follow capture the spirit of the social and political upheaval of 1960s Los Angeles with a veracity that chilled me.” —Los Angeles Times
“One of the high points of the year for mystery fans.” —Parade “For thirty years Phillips has been a must-read writer, and One-Shot Harry is probably his best ever—tense and suspenseful, of course, but also deep, resonant and intelligent. It's a story that needed to be told, and therefore a book that needs to be read.” —Lee Child
“In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett . . . Makes us feel that the war he’s waging is for our own salvation.” —Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series
“Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer.” —Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling author
Gary Phillips has published various novels, comics, novellas, and short stories and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance. Violent Spring, his 1993 debut, was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He as also a story editor on Snowfall, an FX show about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.
View titles by Gary Phillips
A professional thief takes the chance of a lifetime—his biggest score yet—in this tense heist novel set in the heart of contemporary Los Angeles.
After decades of close calls, O’Conner—the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge”—spends most of his time in semi-retirement, running his legitimate businesses and playing pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his wealthy suburb is the wiser to his double-life.
But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay there, and when he is approached with a job he can’t resist, he agrees to mastermind his biggest score yet: a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker, which is hidden underneath his newly constructed basketball arena. As the job goes down, testing O’Conner’s mettle with new challenges, the promise of the score attracts ghosts from his past that he thought were long buried.
Interwoven with flashbacks to O’Conner’s coming-of-age in Southern Los Angeles, this pulse-pounding crime novel is both an homage to Donald Westlake’s Parker series and a rich portrait of a morally gray thief at a crossroads.
Reviews
Praise for Gary Phillips
“Phillips is a storyteller first . . . The wounds of 1963, and the foreshadowing of both better days and harsher ones, feel unnervingly fresh, and a reminder that progress, much as we wish otherwise, never adheres to a linear timeline.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Excellent . . . Phillips’ descriptions of the utter conflagration that was Watts as well as the mysterious fictional events that follow capture the spirit of the social and political upheaval of 1960s Los Angeles with a veracity that chilled me.” —Los Angeles Times
“One of the high points of the year for mystery fans.” —Parade “For thirty years Phillips has been a must-read writer, and One-Shot Harry is probably his best ever—tense and suspenseful, of course, but also deep, resonant and intelligent. It's a story that needed to be told, and therefore a book that needs to be read.” —Lee Child
“In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett . . . Makes us feel that the war he’s waging is for our own salvation.” —Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series
“Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer.” —Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling author
Author
Gary Phillips has published various novels, comics, novellas, and short stories and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance. Violent Spring, his 1993 debut, was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He as also a story editor on Snowfall, an FX show about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.
View titles by Gary Phillips
