A man shows up to "front" for a hired assassin, doing recon on the location, which is an upcoming Western Governor's Convention. The man is killed by a letter bomb sent to his room. The police find evidence in the man's room that he is fronting for a hired assassin, but they don't know who the front man is, and he registered under an alias, so they use the autopsy to try and figure out who this guy is and thus maybe figure out who could have hired him and who the target of the hired assassin might be. His face is pretty much destroyed, so they try to use stomach contents and a very distinctive tattoo to determine his identity.
Meanwhile the guests start showing up at the convention, and the plot seems to be pointing the audience in the direction of two possible targets who are political rivals. One of them is a villain, maybe one is even behind the hired-killing-to-be of the other, but you are kept guessing until the end as to which is which or maybe it's none of the above. Meanwhile, the police are trying to figure out who the target is and who the assassin is with an oversized dose of help from Quincy considering he is not a police investigator.
This has the feel of one of those private investigator/political thrillers of the seventies, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I figured out who the assassin was pretty easily, and other reviewers have said the same, but the rest of the mystery - the why and who - is quite good.
There's a funny bit of business between Quincy and a tattoo artist that he visits when he is trying to narrow down who did the tattoo work on the initial victim. She gets unexpectedly flirtatious with Quincy in his office and his facial expressions are hilarious.
