A Net of Good and Evil

A NET OF GOOD AND EVIL New York City. 1949. It starts with a threat. A ferret-faced man named Wallace walks into Crime Scene looking for info on a friend of Damon Taylor s for an article in Counterattack, the Red-baiting scandal sheet. Taylor chases him off, but Wallace simply finds another victim a guitar-toting folk singer named Woody Guthrie. Later that night, Wallace is knifed to death, and Guthrie becomes the number one suspect. While investigating the murder, Taylor befriends the singer, which is how he meets a young actor named Zero Mostel, another victim of Counterattack. What none of them realize is that the murder has nothing to do with politics. A tall, stately beauty with a very sharp knife is looking for her former partners to settle up over a bank robbery that had gone wrong. Between the Red-baiters and their hapless victims, a crooked cop, a wannabe gangster boss, a Mafia lawyer and the beautiful killer hell-bent on revenge, reporter Damon Taylor s got his hands full with this story and this deadline could be his last.

Michael Scott Cain was the author of seven books of poetry, most recently East Point Poems, and three novels, including Midnight Train, a country music novel. After teaching popular culture and literature at the collegiate level for forty years, he covered the topic in the Frederick News-Post while also serving as jazz, blues, poetry, and folklore editor for Rambles. Cain s final project was a social/political history of the Folk revival of the 1960s called Folk Music and the New Left in the Sixties, as well as this, his second Damon Taylor mystery. Cain passed away on January 30, 2018.