Hard as Nails by Dan Simmons

 

After a kinda substantial planning fail around dinner, I needed a quick read, and this fit the bill. It had been a while since I'd read anything wherein Simmons constrained himself to something like reality, I remembered liking what I'd read of his Kurtz novels (literary Easter egg and all) and this is about as good as I remember those being. Grim and bloody and violent, noirish and twisted, with some amusingly turned phrases and some clearly drawn characters--Kurtz himself among them, of course, but he's not alone. I gather Simmons' politics have ... drifted the past few years, but I saw no evidence of any of that here.