David 'Tool' Roney is a dangerous man with a moral code. Stuck in brutal Parchman Maximum Security Prison in Mississippi, doing life for armed robbery, and abused by his guards, he is consumed by only one thing - escape. His plotting pays off, and together with two other inmates he breaks free. But escaping and staying free are two different things. Tool hits the road with only one thing in mind - to return to the prison and to take vengeance on his tormentors. That's Tool's Law. But then he meets a girl called Rose.



Shank is an archetypal Great American novel as well as an existentialist meditation on imprisonment and a gripping pulp story. The writing is clean and clipped, the pacing is breathless. The action and the story's tragic background roll seamlessly together into a steam train of a novel. If Mark Twain, Jean Paul Sartre and Richard Stark had spent creative time in a prison yard, this is what they might have come up with.