Quarry

This is a 2015 re-issue of the first in the "Quarry" series by Max Allan Collins; Hard Case publishers is re-issuing the first five books in the series. Originally titled The Broker (published 1976), it even had one season as a TV series. Collins is a prolific, award-winning, and multi-faceted writer: movies, screenplays, plays, hard boiled crime novels, historical novels, mysteries, short stories, movie and TV novelizations, and graphic novels... including the one upon which the movie "The Road to Perdition" was based. He's written several comic book series and wrote the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for over a decade. He collaborated with Mickey Spillane on several novels and on one comic book series.
Quarry is a disenchanted and disconnected Vietnam vet and former Marine sniper who has become a hit man as a means to earn a living. He has no animosity towards the people he kills, nor does he have any compassion for them. He just takes the job and gets his money. Simple. He is puzzled and more than a little unhappy when a recent job involves retrieving drugs the victim was carrying, and this initiates the unraveling of the relationship between Quarry and his contact person, known as The Broker.
Still he agrees to take a new job; he is sent to a small port city on the Mississippi River bordering Illinois and Iowa, and he is scheduled to work with his usual partner, the man who scouts the victim. What Quarry can't figure out is why anyone would want to kill the guy. He's a janitor who does not seem to interact with anyone in a significant way, a creature of small habits. But he does the job and makes it look like a burglary gone bad. However, when he returns to the observation post, he is attacked by a man with a wrench and, although he scares the man off, he finds his partner dead and their money for the job gone. He does what he can to dis-identify his partner and then calls the Broker to find out who hired them, because who else would know where they were and that they had money. When Broker refuses to provide the information, Quarry decides to find out on his own and get retribution as well as his money. It's a small town and it's not hard to quietly learn more about the dead man and his family.  Quarry also finds a woman willing to take his mind off things in the meantime. She just happens to co-own a club in town called Bunny's, and Quarry uses her business partnership with the victim's family to track down the person who hired him for the hit. It's a complicated family situation driven by greed, but maybe that isn't the source of the problem. Quarry gets his man and his money but is betrayed by Broker. Quarry is a plain-spoken anti-hero; maybe he grows on you if you read more, but I can't say this one book was enough to get me hooked, although I did order the first season of the TV series through Netflix. Collins won his two Shamus awards for books in a different series, the Nathan Heller series, and I might try one of those.