After years of close calls, O’Conner — the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge” — spends most of his time in semi-retirement, tending to his legitimate businesses funded by his ill-gotten laundered monies and playing couples pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his middle-class subdivision in Hemet is the wiser to his double-life. But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay there. When he’s approached with a job he can’t resist, knocking over a techbro’s swank survival bunker underneath the pro basketball arena he’s built for the team he owns, O’Conner agrees to mastermind his biggest score yet. After the job goes down, which tested challenged O’Conner and the crew, the score attracts new enemies and ghosts from his past he thought were long buried. Interwoven with flashbacks to O’Conner’s coming-of-age in South Central, 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.
“Returning with the first O’Connor novel in some dozen years, L.A.’s own Phillips reinvigorates the heist novel while paying homage to Donald Westlake’s iconic Parker series. Here, O’Connor (no first names, please!) emerges from semi-retirement and a quiet suburban life of pickleball and household chores for one last score — ripping off $21 million in cash from Palmer Van Noy, billionaire tech bro and NBA owner who’s stashed his survivalist loot in a secret bunker built beneath his team’s ultramodern new arena. But planning a heist of this technological complexity ain’t easy, especially when the introduction to the score comes from a woman with ties to O’Connor’s South L.A. childhood, dredging up memories of his first brush with crime while in the foster care system. Buckle up for loads of action and a wild ride through SoCal history and haunts.”
“Phillips’ punchy sequel to the Warlord of Willow Ridge is a raucous, ripped-from-the headlines heist novel.“
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