Quarry's Climax - Max Allan Collins My full review can be found on this link as well: https://www.diaryofdifference.com/2018/05/15/quarrys-climax-max-allan-collins-book-review/

Quarry’s Climax is the 14th book of the Quarry series, and even though I only had the chance to read this one, the rest of the books are certainly something that I have put on my TBR list!



The plot is simple – until, of course, it gets complicated:
Quarry is a Hitman – he kills people for pleasure, I mean, money! He works for this guy ‘’the Broker’’ and his new mission is to protect a chairman of an underrated Porn magazine and strip club – The Climax. When this task might seem easy, suddenly everyone hides something and everyone has secrets. And then our man Quarry – who usually goes on the spot and just kills whoever he needs to, now has to play the role of a detective, find out what the hell is going on in this rat hole, and eliminate any danger.

Now - first things first - I am not usually a person that reads these types of books - Pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, entangled harsh noir stories, but this book pleasantly surprised me with its light reading experience and admirable description of the characters.

Quarry – now that’s one interesting character! Quarry is what happens when you mix a Cowboy personality, with a bit of witty humour, no respect for ladies and egotistical appearance. I happened to actually kind of like this guy!

Though the part I didn’t like it how he treats women and talks about them as they are a piece of meat with no brain whatsoever. I am not a feminist, but I mean – you couldn’t have tried harder, I guess. He would just go to a scene, let us know how irrelevant and thick this lady is, he would sleep with her, never call her again, and then continue with his life as nothing happened. Wonderful, isn’t it?

This is one of a kind book for me, and even though I wouldn’t put it on my favourites pile, it has a special place in my heart. I greatly enjoyed it, and it made me smirk at times. I will definitely explore this genre in the future, and I am sure that Quarry’s Climax was a great beginning for me on that.

I received this book by winning a Goodreads Giveaway from Max Allan Collins and Hard Case Crime.

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Collins series about murders during famous disaters is actually quite good.  This one concerns the the Hindenburg and our hero is the writer of the Saint stories.  In part, this allows Collins to use a little bit of the James Bond lust idea, but also it does make for some interesting asides.  

 

The mystery itself is rather interesting, and Collins does make it believable as well as using it to comment on the rise of the Nazis.

Action? You want action? This book starts out with four of the top CIA agents in an area between two countries unknown to them that they are about to start a war. They can see tanks and other military vehicles from both countries on either side of them. However they are just sitting there. All of a sudden they start moving towards the agents and then Russian paratroopers start descending from the skies above. The war is starting and the agents are caught in the middle. They are, of course, caught in the middle and killed. No one in America knows that they are there. The head of the CIA does not know they are there. They president has ordered that no one should be there. Why are they there? No one seems to know. What is going on.

The Secretary of the Interior is suddenly dead. She has ate a sandwich that has sesame in it. She's allergic to sesame. Is it murder or just a coincidence?

This just the start of what's going on in this book. The president calls in Joe Reeder to help figure out what exactly is going on.

The action only picks up from here.

This is a book you definitely don't want to start reading at bedtime. I had to stop reading the book right in the middle of the best part and I was not happy. I went back and started again just so I could get my heart pumping and into it. Because, believe me, that's exactly what happened when I was reading this book.

I read number 2 in the series of this book and just like this book found it outstanding. A great read that I did not want to put down. The pages just by. The action was continuous. I was so into this book. While the ending did tie up everything, I still did not want it to end.

The characters of Reeder and Rogers are very likeable. They work well together and their relationship is more like brother and sister. I like that. The author did a great job with all the action that was going on in the book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest unbiased review.

[This was from back in 2013, but for some reason I never posted my review anywhere other than my blog.]

 

Encore for Murder is a noir thriller that is, from my understanding, based on Mickey Spillane's notes for an unwritten novel. I had never read/listened to anything by Mickey Spillane before, but the audio sample sounded interesting, so I gave it a shot.

The story: Mike Hammer is hired to act as Rita Vance's bodyguard. Rita, a old flame of Hammer's, is making an acting comeback and has been receiving death threats. Hammer sticks close by her, but Rita doesn't seem to be taking the situation seriously. Then things get a little more complicated, Rita disappears, and Hammer has to find and rescue her.

This did not turn out to be a good pick for me. The best thing I can say is that the story was sort of interesting and I enjoyed the full-cast, radio drama feel of it. Otherwise, though, I kind of hated Mike Hammer.

I don't think I've read a lot of noir fiction at all, nor watched many noir movies. It may just be that the genre isn't for me. Although some attempts were made to update this story (mentions of cell phones, the sex offender registry, and the reluctance of restaurants to serve meat cooked rare), it still felt pretty old school. Nearly every woman Hammer encountered was an enormous flirt – the only exception was maybe Velda, Hammer's secretary and partner, but even she had moments when she acted liked Hammer's girlfriend-in-waiting.

I might just have rolled my eyes at Hammer's very male gaze when it came to women, until I got to the torture scene.

Rita was tied naked to a chair and was being threatened with a blow torch. I was a little uncomfortable with some of the almost sexual phrasing used in this scene, such as the description of the blowtorch as “a terrible flame ready to lick her flesh.” Also, post-torture, there was this from Hammer: “I've had a better time with a naked woman.” His lover had been stripped naked, beaten, and almost burned, and his first thought after rescuing her was about sex? Eww. Just eww. Other than feeling a little shaky, Rita barely seemed affected her own kidnapping and torture, which bothered me, too.

(spoiler show)

Prior to listening to this, I checked out a few reviews and noticed at least one mention of Hammer killing a lot of people. I read and listen to a lot of things with violence in them, so I just noted this and moved on. He really does kill a lot of people, though, and sometimes he kills them very violently. If I remember correctly, at one point he almost decapitated a guy with a car trunk door. I think it was his reaction, or non-reaction, to killing people that bothered me the most. At least one of the other characters even commented on the amount of killing he did, and he just brushed them off.

It was short and most of the acting was okay, but if this is what Mike Hammer stories are generally like, they are very much not for me. It's funny, I can root for and even kind of like characters like Jeff Lindsay's Dexter, and yet Mike Hammer just made me feel kind of icky. Maybe it's because Dexter makes it very clear that he is a sociopath, while Hammer seems to have zero recognition of the fact that some of the things he does are not okay?

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)