Quarry’s Ex (2011) (Quarry #10) by Max Allan Collins. Quarry has long stopped being a hitman. Now he is a hitman preventer, stopping the hitters before they get their target. Quarry is an anti-hero if you will. But he is a pretty good one, if you like the stand-offish type.
Now he is in a small casino town about 70 miles from Vegas. How he got the information about the up-coming hit, I don’t know. It isn’t explained in the book but you must assume Quarry has some insider information even at this late date. Anyway, the target is a film director working in and around town. It is a B movie but it might bring the director back to the A List. But not if he’s dead.
Quarry talks the man into using his unique skills to protect him, especially easy as Quarry has killed the set-up man of the hit duo. Now Quarry just has to find and stop the kill part of the team, a man who disguises his kills by making them look like accidents. That is the easy part of the job.
Harder is finding the person who ordered the hit. Quarry tracks through the movie sets and comes up with two likely candidates. There is the Mob boss who has put the money up for the film. His motives are slim but he is a Mob boss
The other is the director’s younger wife. She might be mad at him for his carousing ways, or is looking for all the property without messing with a divorce.
Did I mention this is the lady of the book’s title?
Quarry has to stay in control of the situation without getting himself killed, and still discover who is behind it all. As usual there is some semi-graphic sex tossed in, as well as a behind the scenes look at how movies are made. In all, not the best of the series but more than adequate for a summer beach read. And again Hard Case Crime has produced another in their large series of first rate thrillers/crime novels. ( )

As detailed in the First Quarry, Quarry is a former Vietnam veteran whose real name is never disclosed to the reader. He comes back, finds his fiancé,Joanie, in bed with another guy, finds that guy working under his car and kicks the jack out, survives a murder trial, and is then recruited by a mysterious figure named the Broker to carry out hits and we don't mean hits in baseball.
In Quarry's Ex, Quarry no longer works for the Broker, who is no longer among the living. Rather, Quarry has obtained the Broker's lists of contacts and he follows the hired assassins, staking them out and figuring out who their prey is. Once he is confident in that information, he offers a deal to the targets, he will, for a price, take out their hitmen and find whoever is the responsible party. I guess everyone needs a career doing something.

Here, Quarry follows a hitman team to a small gambling town in Nevada, a town which seems to have a Western theme. The target is a Hollywood film director who is bankrolled by Mob money, protected by a phalanx of balding wannabe bikers, and married to Quarry's Ex-wife, the legendary Joanie who hasn't lost her fabulous figure in the fifteen years since he last saw her. Does he want to kill her or have sex with her, she asks. Maybe both, he answers.

The star of the show is a Playboy centerfold who is out to make her way to the top whatever it takes. Quarry offers to interview her as part of his publicity work. Of course, it doesn't help that she's the mobster's gal and she had an affair with the director.

This is a typical Quarry book filled with humor, bodies dropping left and right, and terrific writing from start to finish. Collins doesn't try to make these stories some magnum opus. Instead, he concentrates on what he does best -- telling a story. ( )

Really a prequel to the other Quarry books. This one had the least plausible plot, I thought. Quarry is well into his role as hitman of hitmen, in the service of those who have become targets. Those who have read any of the other Quarry novels will have already have numerous pieces to Quarry’s back-story: how he came to be recruited by the Broker, the betrayal by his ex-wife, his time in Vietnam. That he would meet his ex-wife as the wife of a B-movie director who has been targeted for assassination *and* run into part of the team assigned to perform the hit struck me as coincidences beyond the possible.

Nevertheless, all the Quarry stories are just plain fun, and this one is no exception. ( )

A plot so boiled it's pure hard crime essence.

"I don’t want to kill you.”
“That’s almost like…almost like hearing you say you still love me, Jack.”"

Based on the ingenious premise of an ex-hitman who now makes a living following his ex-colleagues, identifying their targets and letting them know their life is in danger so he can offer to remove the assassin and the person who hired them, obviously for a large fee.

It’s got an amazing opening, setting the scene and Quarry's character and them wham! Tone set for the rest of the book and your hooked, with pitch perfect dialogue and tight plotting and it doesn’t let up for its short (under 300pgs) length. There is no over the top action, but it is a darkly amusing thriller as we follow Quarry trying to work out the when and the how the hit will be made and then tracking down the instigator. Tripping over B movie actors, gangsters, bikers, harried movie producers and of course his ex.

Does exactly what it sets out to do and does it damn well and it’s got such a amazing cover. Recommended ( )

Published in September 2011, this is the first book from the “Hard Case Crime” imprint since it moved from Dorchester to Titan Books and it’s a cracker. The story features Collins' anti-hero, Quarry, a Vietnam vet and former hit man who now offers a singular service protecting people from hit men. He ends up on a low-budget movie production (Hard Wheels 2), looking out for the director, who is the target for a hit-team. On set he unexpectedly meets his former wife - who had betrayed him when he was in Vietnam; her infidelity leading him to become a hit man in the first place. The plot moves forward at break-neck speed and has action, sex, and violence aplenty. Collins writes with clever, taut, hard-boiled prose; his low-life characters and their motivations are believable; the plot is sharply focussed and the twists are imaginative and realistic. This is a superb pulp fiction crime novel in the classic noir tradition – a cracking, full-throttle page-turner. ( )