Loved the twists in this one. Series keeps getting better! ( )

Quarry in the Middle is Collins' ninth book in the Quarry series which began with Quarry in 1976, and includes Quarry's List, Quarry's Deal, Quarry's Cut, Quarry's Vote, Quarry's Greatest Hits, The Last Quarry, The First Quarry, Quarry's Ex, and Wrong Quarry. 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 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 in the Middle, 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.

Quarry in the Middle is firmly set in small-town (Haydee's Port) Midwest in the mid-1980's. Collins reinforces that setting in time and place by his descriptions of the cars used at the time, the music playing on the radio, the posters on the walls in the decrepit bars, and

the hair and outfits worn by the folks peopling this small waste of a town. The women, for instance, often have frizzed hair and pink tube tops.

Quarry follows a man he knows is a mob hitman to a small town with one wreck of a hotel, a run-down main street filled with bars and dives, and a run-down casino by the river. Both the casino and one of the bars on main street are run by guys who are rival and who both have heavy Chicago connections. Quarry is not a secretive a he would like to be as both of the mobbed-up rivals in this town clue into the fact he is not the vetinary drug salesman he pretends to be.

Quarry checks into the same motel as the hitman he is following which leads to some amusing scenes as Quarry comes out of the motel pool after doing laps and sees the hitman sitting next to where Quarry left his rolled-up towel with a nine-millimeter wrapped in it.

This Quarry book is non-stop action as Quarry rolls into one fight after another and into one bed after another. In this book, Quarry is definitely single and definitely on the make.

Collins never lets the reader forget however that all the action is taking place in this small town waste of a town in the 1980's Midwest and that most of the people in this town have nothing but a bleak future ahead of them. His descriptions of the casinos and clubs and the denizens in them are just right on. Collins also takes the reader step by step through a high-stakes poker game.

All in all, although this book may be nothing more than another chapter in the Quarry series, it is a fun, worthwhile read, firmly in the hard case crime tradition. Expect to finish the book the same day you start it. ( )

Another good, quick read. I really love the Quarry books. Perfect HCC material. Quarry's toughness, practicality & wit are irresistible. His amoral attitude is quite refreshing in our PC world.

I've heard there will be another Quarry novel published by HCC in 2010. I'm looking forward to it. In the meantime, I have several other similar novels of Collins' that I'm looking forward to reading & will try to collect the rest of the Quarry books, even though they've been out of print for years. ( )

Written in between the last Quarry and the First one (dah), we find our anti-hero on a job with a body in his trunk. Quarry has decided on a new line of work now that the "broker" is dead, and he came into possession of a fat file that listed all the contract killers in the broker's employ as well as their work history. The idea is to tail one of the assassins, determine who his next hit might be then go to the intended victim and offer to kill the killer and the person who hired him (as an extra bonus) for a rather substantial fee.

Everything starts to go a little wrong. After Quarry has taken care of the two hit-men sent to kill the owner of the Paddlewheel Casino, he is hired to find out who ordered the hit on its owner, Richard Cordell. Allegedly, the former mob boss and owner of the competing strip jointa and gambling establishment, Quarry soon discovers it was unlikely the old man who is in the throes of dementia.

That's enough totally without spoiling the plot, but I have to admit the ending was a surprise. Lots of fun for us Walter Mittys. ( )