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Created in 1976, Max Allan Collins's Quarry is a man and a product of the times, a character who would take the genre of crime fiction in a new and daringly amoral direction. A Vietnam vet, Quarry gets in some marital trouble when return home, has killed a man and got something of a taste for it. Finding he has a need to live a little more on the edge, he recognises that working for a living as a hitman is amoral, but in Nam he has learned to accept life and death as meaningless. He has however also learned the importance of survival. Which means Quarry is not too impressed that his agent, Broker, has put him a risk when he sends him to kill a man who is carrying something valuable and it turns out to be heroin, so he puts a little of the product aside as future down-payment. Quarry's concerns about Broker's arrangements increase on his next assignment to take out an innocuous man in a small town in Iowa. Things don't seem right and sure enough after carrying out the hi

Fire Pattern starts out as an investigation into the rare phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion, incidents of which have been documented for centuries but never scientifically explained, and in a very Bob Shaw way, the author manages to take this in an entirely new direction, far away from where it started. All the way to Mercury in fact. Rayner Jerome is a reporter for the Whiteford Examiner, an employee with a little more professionalism and care about grammar and scientific accuracy than most of his colleagues. So when an extraordinary cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion occurs, Jerome spots some suspicious information and takes the time to investigate the matter thoroughly, much to the frustration of his boss who just wants a quick article. While pondering news of a NASA Quicksilver mission to Mercury to examine an unusual artefact that has been spotted on the surface of the planet's northern pole, Jerome discovers that there is a connection between recent case of SHC a