Hardcase — Dan Simmons

Award-winning author Dan Simmons takes the reader on a trip with Joe Kurtz through the cold, windy streets of Buffalo, New York, where one wrong move could mean a bellyful of lead...

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...