Hard Freeze

By Dan Simmons

St. Martin's Minotaur

ISBN: 0-312-27854-3

296 Pages

 

Joe Kurtz lives life as a marked man. His former prison mates want to kill him. The mob wants to kill him. Crooked cops want to kill him. His daughter is in the custody of an abusive drunk. He has no PI license, thanks to a murder conviction and 12 years in Attica. Welcome to Buffalo, Kurtz's dreary world.

Kurtz and his former secretary are trying to make their way in the world running an Internet service providing info on class reunions. What else is an ex-PI with no prospects going to do? Well, besides surviving, Kurtz's chief skill, he takes on the occasional case, this time a concert violinist who has discovered his daughter's killer alive in Buffalo.

Kurtz gets help from some unlikely sources: Pruno, an elderly heroin addict, who manages to keep a laptop and email, and the sister of the mob don trying to kill him. Pruno helps Kurtz because both the violinist and Kurtz are his friends. The sister wants to be the new don, and using Kurtz to get at her rival effectively neutralizes her brother. It puts Kurtz in the crosshairs of one more enemy, a serial killer who is a master of false identity.

When we meet Kurtz, he comes off as a sociopath, interested only in survival. Kurtz is a brutal, vengeful man, willing to kill to stay alive. As the story progresses and the plots and counterplots become more complicated, Kurtz manipulates the situation to make all his enemies implode on each other: The cops, the rival mob family, the serial killer, even his daughter's boozing stepfather, who, it turns out, has developed a taste for his young charge.

Simmons carefully puts pieces of the puzzle together, slowly unraveling the serial killer's world while meticulously constructing an explosive out for Kurtz. The characters are finely drawn, from Arlene, Kurtz' long-suffering secretary to Angelina, lady who wants to take over the mob from her worthless brother in Attica and the rival boss who raped her. John Wellington Frears, Kurtz's client, is a study in quiet dignity, a man with nothing to lose and willing to lose it all. Crooked cops Brubaker and Myers are little more than thugs with badges.

Most chilling of all is James B. Hansen, the serial killer hiding in the most unlikely and dangerous of places. As all the nooses tighten on Kurtz, Hansen adds his own, not realizing he is providing his prey with the solution to most of his problems. The last third of the book becomes a violent, high-stakes chess game. Only then does Hansen realize he's been the hunted all along.

The landscape is bleak, which is typical of Buffalo in the winter. So is Kurtz's life, but he doesn't let it grind him down. People try to use him, and he uses them back. It makes for a plot so intricate that a spectacular climax doesn't come off as a surprise, just very, very satisfying.

Violent and relentless, Simmons hammers the reader, cutting off scenes and chapters at points that force you to keep going. His descriptions of Buffalo are not the same as other writer's descriptions of other cities. Kurtz is living in on Buffalo's underside; he, and we, see only the rot and stench of a dying Mafia, dying city, and of Kurtz's own life. Yet while Kurtz looks like just another sociopath in the beginning, we soon realize there is a tarnished knight buried under that silent, brutal exterior. Some rays of hope enter his life as the story races to the end, but he never acknowledges them. To him, it's just a survival game. Can't wait to read the next round. It's mean, lean, and hardboiled as hell.