The Return of Kid Cooper

**WESTERN WRITERS OF AMERICA 2019 SPUR AWARDS WINNER!**

"[A] first-rate novel."—True West magazine

"Brad Smith has got the goods—he’s funny, poignant, evocative, and he tells a blistering tale. A writer to watch, a comet on the horizon."—Dennis Lehane, award-winning author of Mystic River

"Smith has written tight, fast-paced novels his entire career…and reading one is like riding a thoroughbred."--The Chronicle Herald

In the style of Cormac McCarthy, a gritty tale of justice and revenge in the Wild West.

The year is 1910.

Nate Cooper is an old-school cowboy. He sees the change brought by the turn of the century—horses giving way to motorcars, his girlfriend marrying his best friend, and his nemesis running for governor—and reckons none of it to be good. The west is being tamed, and with progress, some things are lost. But people? They tend to stay the same. Even after spending nearly thirty years in a Montana prison for a wrongful murder conviction, Nate's moral compass is true and unwavering: he does all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

So when he returns to his Northern Montana ranching town to find the Blackfoot Indians—the people he went to prison trying to defend—are still being cheated out of their territory by ranchers, Nate can’t rest on his laurels. With grit, determination, a quick trigger finger, and the help of the woman he used to love, Nate sets out to settle the score and force some justice in into the changing world. Before long, though, he’ll discover that justice doesn’t come cheap.

Brad Smith has worked as a farmer, signalman, insulator, truck driver, bartender, schoolteacher, maintenance mechanic, roofer, and carpenter. He is the author of nine novels, including One-Eyed Jacks, which was nominated for the Dashiell Hammett Prize,  and All Hat, which became a 2007 major motion picture staring Keith Carradine. The Return of Kid Cooper is the recipient of the Western Writers of America 2019 SPUR Award for Best Traditional Novel. He lives in Dunnville, Ontario, near the north shore of Lake Erie.