Quarry

Originally titled The Broker (1976), this reissue of the series debut of Collins’s charismatic antihero is timed to coincide with a new TV series. When the man called Quarry returned from the killing fields of Vietnam to find his wife in bed with a guy named Williams, he suppressed his rage long enough to get his revenge by knocking the jack out from Williams’s car while the man was working underneath it. While Quarry avoided punishment for murder, Quarry was unemployable, until a man known only as Broker offered to set him up with murders for hire, in exchange for a cut of the contract. The business relationship has been an amicable one, but it comes under strain when a last minute switch at Illinois’s Quad City Airport has Quarry strong-arming a man disguised as a priest, who turns out to be smuggling heroin. Since the events of this book precede the circumstances that set up the creative premise of later books, this proves to be one of the series’ less interesting entries. (Sept.)