THE PEKING TARGET

Expedition #10 for super-spy Quiller gets underway when a fellow British agent just back from Peking is killed--and Quiller himself is nearly eliminated too. Obviously, someone's out to prevent the exposure of a piece of intelligence re China; so a barely-recovered Quiller is dispatched to Peking, posing as bodyguard for the UK secretary of state (who's going to a state funeral there). Soon, however, the violence quickly escalates: the secretary is blown up at the funeral; another British agent dies; Quiller fends off assassins left and right; the US ambassador is killed. What's going on? Terrorism? Or, as one old China hand suggests (he'll be dead soon too), the work of a Triad biggie named Tung? Quiller searches for Tung, then, tracing him to a monastery. (The mission involves a deadly drop from a plane into mountain/rock terrain; Quiller's female assistant is impossibly injured and demands that Quiller make love to her and then kill her. . . which he does.) And finally Quiller, now captured, learns the truth--which involves dirty Russian doings, kidnap, and blackmail. Outlandish derring-do from martial arts to boa constrictors, efficiently (if a little longwindedly) trotted out--for fanciers of macho-ish violence.