TOROS & TORSOS by Craig McDonald
Synopsis:
Hector Lassiter is a legendary crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes. But Hector frequently goes a step beyond, drawing friends and lovers into the tawdry and turbulent territory of his fiction. Now, the large-living pulp author has at last met his match in the ultimate performance artist: a phantom killer committed to the art of murder… a blood-thirsty provocateur who leaves a string of macabre tableaus modeled on famous works of surrealist painting and photography…
Against the vivid backdrops of a killer hurricane that nearly destroyed the Florida Keys in 1935, the Spanish Civil War, post-war Hollywood and the first days of the Castro regime in Cuba, Hector engages in a decades-long duel against a cabal of killer artists…
As in its Edgar®-nominated predecessor Head Games, history and myth merge, drawing on recent scholarship pointing to the existence of a dark underground of artists, photographers and art collectors that flourished in Europe and United States through most of the Twentieth Century.
In a blood-limned haze of love, deception, murderous metaphor and devastating betrayal, nothing is what it seems and obsession and creativity collide in a wicked and unexpected climax that will shake the art world to its foundations…
“IT’S NOT ART
UNTIL SOMEBODY DIES”
_________
“This is granite poetry in all its
stone glory. Such is the sheer artistry of the writing.”— KEN BRUEN
Author Comment:
TOROS & TORSOS is a prequel to my Edgar® and Gumshoe awards-nominated debut novel, HEAD GAMES.
T&T finds crime novelist Hector Lassiter in his prime, living in Key West in 1935, and preparing for an approaching hurricane that devastated the middle Keys. He is also grappling with a very strange murder. The novel moves through several different phases of Hector's storied life and charts the arc of his friendship with Ernest Hemingway — a rocky relationship hinted at in HEAD GAMES.
Following the template established in the first book, dark humor and secret histories combine with a cast of real life figures (Hemingway, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, John Huston and John Dos Passos, among others this time out) to produce what critics have called "the most unusual and readable crime series to come along in years."
The novel will be published this September by Bleak House Books, and will appear simultaneously in hardcover, trade paperback and limited edition formats.
Topics/Categories:
Cuba, Film Noir, Hemingway, Hollywood, Hurricane, Key West, Murder, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Spanish Civil War, surrealism
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Original Publish Date:
09/01/2008
ISBNs:
978-1-60648-000-7 978-1-60648-001-4 978-1-60648-002-1
Formats:
Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Limited Edition
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