Toros & Torsos - Hardcover

Craig McDonald

3.92

123 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606480006 ISBN 13: 9781606480007

Publisher: Bleak House Books, 2008

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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...

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From the Author:

A question every author is asked is which of his own books is his favorite. Selecting between your novels that way is said to be a little like choosing between your kids. Not so, at least for me: You simply can't hurt your own books' feelings and novels--even your own, if you're honest--don't inspire unconditional love the way that your children do. "Toros & Torsos" is my favorite of my Hector Lassiter novels and the one I recommend when a potential reader is faced with an array of titles and asks which one to start with. T&T turns on many of my longstanding obsessions springing from larger-than-life personalities (Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, to name just a few found in this novel), to notorious unsolved crimes (one of those being the murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called "Black Dahlia") and one of my favorite locales, Key West, Florida.
Another question you often get when you write novels that use real people and real events in fiction: "What's real, and what did you make up?" If you've done your job as a historical novelist, that never really becomes clear for your readers. One of my delights related to this novel, in particular, is the number of people who confide that they thought something was "too over-the-top to be real, but then I Googled, and..." --Craig McDonald

About the Author:

Edgar nominee Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites.

His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author.

His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews to be published by Bleak House Books.

McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code. He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell and James Sallis.

He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, and the International Association of Crime Writers.

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