Hard as Nails is the third Joe Kurtz novel by the eclectic author Dan Simmons. The previous two were Hard Freeze and Hard Case but this one stands alone.

The protagonist, Joe Kurtz, is a Buffalo area former PI who has more than a little in common with such fictional heroes as Marlowe, Marv (from Sin City), Mike Hammer, or Burke. He is a former PI because as an ex-con he can't have a PI license. He is an ex-con because he did 11 years in Attica for killing a Mafia ranking member who murdered his partner. Once in prison he managed to make enemies of Black Muslims, white power types and of course organized crime adherents. But Kurtz is not so easy to kill.

As the book opens Kurtz is walking his parole officer to her car when both of them are shot. As Kurtz and his parole officer have any number of enemies with long memories the list of suspects is pretty large.

This list includes the feuding heads of two upstate NY mafia families, each of whom assure Kurtz that if they wanted him dead he would have been.

Like any good noir hero Kurtz has his share of femme fatales, including a former girlfriend /police detective who wants to either arrest him or marry him and the aforementioned head of one of the Mafia groups (think Lucrezia Borgia as a young woman).

Silly but fun, this book wasn't quite as good as the first two.