"Night Work" by Brett Battles

Jonathan Quinn has an unusual job. He works for a firm that, among other things, is in the disposal business – as in the disposal of bodies. The clients tend to be official government agencies like the CIA, who need inconvenient corpses disposed of quickly and quietly. Or they may need a body strategically left to send a message.

Quinn and his colleagues are in the Bronx in New York City, depositing a body at a building site. Their mission is accomplished, when he receives a phone call – an emergency order for disposal of a body in Manhattan. And the order has come out of process, bypassing his boss. The body is a government courier, shot execution-style in a small Manhattan park. Quinn discovers what the killers were looking for and missed – a small computer disk, secreted in the victim’s sleeve.

What he doesn’t discover until later is that the killers are watching. And following.

Brett Battles

Night Work, a novella by Brett Battles, is a good introduction to the Jonathan Quinn series of thriller / suspense novels. There are currently 12 in the series, beginning with The ExComsand the most recent being The Fractured. 

In addition to the Jonathan Quinn series, Battles is the author of the Project Eden series (a spin-off of the Quinn novels) and the Rewinder series, and the co-author of the Alexandra Poe series – more than 30 books in all. A member of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers, he lives in Los Angeles.

Night Workis packed with action and tension, as the killers close in on Quinn and colleagues at a mortuary. If you like stories with nail-biting suspense, police chases, Russian crime bosses, and a hero with an interesting occupation, the Jonathan Quinn series may be an exact fit.