"Vern Smith’s ‘The Gimmick’ is about a hard-nosed cop, a bombshell in a belly shirt, and a bank machine card scam. It’s a complex and intense story, and who can resist the brilliant opening?" 
– Philip Alexander, Front & Centre Magazine

"Kafka meets Sherwood Anderson… The characters are fully drawn and completely absorbing. The plots, unpredictable right to the end."
– New Pop Lit

"Smith’s tale of not-so-small-time crooks with a knack for draining other people’s bank accounts and the bumbling cops on their tails (one of whom is among the crooks’ victims) is a flat-out riot. Punchy dialogue moves the story. Humorous human characters bring it life. The plot is solid. Smith sets the bar high."
– Matthew Firth, The Ottawa (X)Press

Windsor native Vern Smith grew up twenty minutes from the green ghetto - an actual Detroit phenomenon. His fiction has appeared in Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McClelland & Stewart), as well as the Insomniac Press anthologies, Iced, Hard Boiled Love, and Revenge. His novelette, The Gimmick, was a finalist for Canada's highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award. A veteran of four newspapers and three magazines, Smith's non-fiction has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, Eye, Broken Pencil, and Quill & Quire, among other publications. He most recently managed CJAM 99.1 FM, where he founded the twenty-four-hour radio marathon Joe Strummer Day to Confront Poverty in Windsor-Detroit. He now lives on the edge of Chicago where urban Illinois meets the prairie.