Hardcase (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Hardcase (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries) Book

Penzler Pick, July 2001: Dan Simmons is not an author who writes the same book twice. He doesn't even come close. Since switching from fantasy/horror to mystery, Simmons has written Crook Factory, set in Cuba and starring Ernest Hemingway, and Darwin's Blade, featuring a genius insurance claims investigator who only has to look at a demolished vehicle to be able to know exactly what led up to the crash. With Hardcase, Simmons both pays homage to over-the-top pulp fiction and writes a remarkably good example of it. Joe Kurtz has no intention of giving up his chosen profession of private investigator, even though he's just spent 12 years in jail. He believes it's only a matter of finding the right case. But that case will never come to him, so he pays a call on Byron Tatick Farino, mob boss, and suggests that for $400 a day plus expenses, he'll try to find the Family's missing accountant and also figure out who's hijacking the Family's trucks. Farino is inclined to let him do this since he has nothing to lose, and Joe did save his son from a fate worse than death in Cell Block D. So Joe is off and running, and after picking up his ex-assistant, Arlene, he opens an office in the basement of a porn store and begins looking into the Mob's business. He no sooner interviews the accountant's wife than she is found dead and horribly mutilated. The list of those who want Joe to butt out is long, and they are evidently very serious about preventing Joe from finding out too much. There's the person who is hijacking the trucks, and wants to continue. There's also a couple of sociopaths (if not psychopaths) named Malcolm and Cutter who work for the Mob's lawyer. Unsurprisingly, they are not exactly loyal and know that there's a $10,000 reward for the guy who wasted Ali, one of the Death Mosque brothers in Cell Block D. Finally, there are the Levine brothers, Manny and Sammy. Joe hasn't heard of either of them, but word is that Manny blames Joe for Sammy's death. These numerous and varied storylines remain remarkably lucid as Simmons treats us to a fast-paced thriller with excitement on every page. --Otto PenzlerRead More

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  • Product Description

    Once Joe Kurtz needed revenge-and revenge cost him eleven years in Attica prison. Now Kurtz needs a job, and the price is going to be higher. Out of touch, out of prison, and with only one friend in the world, Kurtz signs on with the Farinos, a Mob family who has a problem in its own backyard. The Farinos don't know it yet, but they have a bigger problem in Kurtz himself. Searching for a mob accountant gone missing, Kurtz starts rubbing the wrong people the wrong way for all the right reasons. Within forty-eight hours he's got two low-rent, high-impact killers on his trail, a beautiful, ruthless woman in his bed, a legendary hit man flying in from Denmark, and the wreckage of his past falling down around him. As Kurtz keeps pushing into the shadows of a chaotic underworld, he turns up killers, freaks, traitors, and madmen. And the final outcome will be the most devastating of all ...AUTHORBIO: In his twenty years of publication, DAN SIMMONS has won more than 50 major American and international awards for his fiction. Currently working on a new novel and screenplay, Mr. Simmons lives in Colorado.

  • 0312980167
  • 9780312980160
  • Dan Simmons
  • 1 August 2002
  • Minotaur Books
  • Mass Market Paperback (Book)
  • 291
  • First THUS
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