A Hit on the Hitman
Review of the Titan Books / Hard Case Crime Kindle eBook edition (November 12, 2019) published simultaneously with the Hard Case Crime paperback and Skyboat Media audiobook.

She leaned in. “We should’ve stopped this shit ten years ago. We could have, you know. If we’d just disappeared then, who would have cared?”
“But we didn’t.” I shrugged. “Maybe this is a second chance.”
“Maybe. But we’re going to have to kill some people.”
I shrugged again. “I’m okay with that.”
She shrugged. Sipped. “So am I.”

This is Quarry #15, a late entry in the long-running Quarry series (1976-2022) about an anti-hero hitman. After a betrayal, the anonymous character (Quarry simply being a trademark nickname) turned the tables on the various middleman brokers and the contract hitmen by stalking the stalkers and taking his fees from the planned victims. The prolific novelist and comic book author Max Allan Collins (761 books to his credit on Goodreads! 😲) returns periodically to this protagonist, but usually places the settings back in the late 1900s rather than aging the character up to the present day.

Thus Killing Quarry finds the hitman in retirement and running a motel resort. But suddenly it appears that he himself is being stalked by hired killers possibly in search of payback for his disruptions of the status quo. Eventually he manages to join forces with another character who is perhaps seeking retirement and together they end up infiltrating a summit of contract brokers. Will they manage to breakup the conspiracy and not turn on each other by the end? Never count Quarry out even when the chips appear to be down.

I read Killing Quarry from picking it up as a $1.99 Kindle Deal of the Day and after enjoying some recent books by Scott Von Doviak from Hard Case Crime.

Trivia and Links
Killing Quarry is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of April 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site. ( )