John Dortmunder gets out of prison and immediately begins planning his next heist. Unfortunately, the job turns out be a version of Groundhog Day and Dortmunder and his crew will have to keep stealing a priceless emerald over and over and over again. 
 This edition of The Hot Rock had an introduction from the late Donald Westlake where he explained that he originally thought of the basic plot for this as one of his Parker crime novels he wrote as Richard Stark. However, he realized that the ultra-serious Parker would never tolerate the repeated robberies so he invented John Dortmunder and changed it to a comedy. That's a great little example of what continues to amaze me about the way Westlake was able to carve out various niches within the crime/mystery genre. 
 In this first book, Westlake establishes the Dortmunder universe where a variety of off-beat characters like his chatty friend Kelp and car-obsessed driver Stan Murch would become part of his regular robbery crew. It also gives us the formula that we'd get for the rest of the series. The guys want to pull a job, but there's some kind of odd complication or problem that either makes the job or it's aftermath one problem after another. Bad luck and trouble would follow gloomy Dortmunder throughout the series. Sometimes he'd get the loot and sometimes he wouldn't, but he'd always be good for a lot of laughs along the way.