Shoot the Dog

From a writer who “rivals Elmore Leonard at his best” (Publishers Weekly) comes the third novel in the Virgil Cain series—a riveting story that opens with the discovery of the body of a movie star near the Hudson River.

In upstate New York, Virgil Cain's draft horses are pulling hay in the fields when two film scouts offer him $500 a day for their use in a film. He pockets the money, but the chaotic set of Frontier Woman turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Producer Sam Jonson clearly has her heart in the wrong place with her husband-cum-director Robb, who costs her a major financier, not to mention the Native American casino owner Ronnie Red Hawk, who has a vested interest in an alternate leading lady. After one—and then a second—young woman is found dead, Virgil discovers that more is at stake than the interests of a casino magnate…and he’d better step in before the charming ten-year-old actress Georgia ends up the next victim of this deadly production.

“Smith has a marvelous control of his material, effortlessly mixing laugh-out-loud comedy with streaks of country noir” (Booklist), and he is “a writer to watch, a comet on the horizon” (Dennis Lehane).