Virgil Cain

Accolades for Brad Smith’s celebrated crime novels include a nomination for the coveted Dashiell Hammett Prize. In Smith’s novel Red Means Run, prominent attorney Mickey Dupree is found dead at Burr Oak Golf and Country Club. On record as hating Mickey, small-time rancher Virgil Cain quickly becomes the prime suspect. Virgil knows the fix is in—so he sets out to find the real killer.

Brad Smith continues to make a name for himself as a darkly comic crime novelist. His second mystery starring Virgil Cain, Crow’s Landing finds the jack-of-all-trades out for a day of fishing on the Hudson River. But when he reels in a strange steel cylinder, a crooked cop quickly seizes it - along with his boat. Soon Virgil is teaming up with Dusty, a single mom who seems to know a little too much about the cylinder and its contents.

In upstate New York, Virgil Cain is drawing hay behind his team of massive Percherons when two movie scouts show up and offer $500 a day to use the horses in a film to be shot in the area. Virgil, in need of cash, reluctantly pockets the money, but he soon finds the chaotic set of Frontier Woman to be more trouble than it's worth. Savvy producer Sam Sawchuk is in over her head; when she's not propping up her talent-challenged husband-cum-director, she's trying to keep tabs on a new investor, casino owner Ronnie Red Hawk, a rambling egomaniac with designs on an infamous starlet.