![Toros & Torsos: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter Series Book 3) by [McDonald, Craig]](https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51AwW2tP-XL._SY346_.jpg)
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Review
Spanning the years from 1935 to 1959, Edgar®-finalist McDonald's second novel to feature crime novelist Hector Lassiter (after 2007's Head Games) deftly mixes myth, history and a serial killer who arranges dead bodies to resemble surrealistic art. Lassiter, whose work embodies the write what you live and live what you write ethos, loves hard, drinks hard... As a popular author, Lassiter interacts with such notables as Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, whom the author skillfully animates. Other celebrities of the day make cameo appearances. Solidly grounded in such actual events as the Key West hurricane of 1935, the Spanish Civil War and Cuba's last days before Castro, McDonald's imaginative tale takes an enjoyably different approach to art and murder --Publishers Weekly
Craig McDonald's novel is astounding, covering everything from top class mystery to a real depiction of such notaries as The Surrealists and Hemingway and literally makes them live and breathe. I always felt I had a good grasp on Hemingway, now I feel I know him, such is the sheer artistry of the writing. This is granite poetry in all its stone glory. Cross Cormac McCarthy with Craig Holden and throw in the wizardry of Pete Dexter, then you come close to realizing how amazing this novel is. --Ken Bruen, PRIEST
In his lush, sprawling second novel, Toros & Torsos, Craig McDonald draws together both the timeliest markers of mid-century America modernism, surrealism, film noir, pulp fiction, communism and the eternal touchstones of classic crime literature desire, chaos, obsession and loss. It is a bold, bloody landscape, but McDonald never lets its scale become so big that we lose sight of the lively characters at its dark center. Wily and wistful Hector Lassiter, a complicated, rueful and haunted Ernest Hemingway and dozens more draw us close to their chests, anchor us, win our favor and, in the end, break our hearts. --MEGAN ABBOTT, Edgar Award-winning author of QUEENPIN
Craig McDonald's novel is astounding, covering everything from top class mystery to a real depiction of such notaries as The Surrealists and Hemingway and literally makes them live and breathe. I always felt I had a good grasp on Hemingway, now I feel I know him, such is the sheer artistry of the writing. This is granite poetry in all its stone glory. Cross Cormac McCarthy with Craig Holden and throw in the wizardry of Pete Dexter, then you come close to realizing how amazing this novel is. --Ken Bruen, PRIEST
In his lush, sprawling second novel, Toros & Torsos, Craig McDonald draws together both the timeliest markers of mid-century America modernism, surrealism, film noir, pulp fiction, communism and the eternal touchstones of classic crime literature desire, chaos, obsession and loss. It is a bold, bloody landscape, but McDonald never lets its scale become so big that we lose sight of the lively characters at its dark center. Wily and wistful Hector Lassiter, a complicated, rueful and haunted Ernest Hemingway and dozens more draw us close to their chests, anchor us, win our favor and, in the end, break our hearts. --MEGAN ABBOTT, Edgar Award-winning author of QUEENPIN
Product Description
Hector Lassiter is a crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes, frequently drawing those around him into the tawdry and turbulent territory of his novels. In "Toros & Torsos," Hector meets his match in the person of a mysterious killer committed to the craft of murder: an audacious provocateur who leaves a string of increasingly macabre, homicidal tableaus modeled after seminal works of surrealist art. This wildly original noir saga pits Lassiter against the ultimate performance artist in a duel to the death extending across three decades and three continents and ends in a wicked and unexpected climax that shakes the art world to its foundations. Life imitating art... art imitating death, and for some, it isn't truly art until somebody dies.
"A bold, ambitious, genre-bending novel from the talented Craig McDonald." --George Pelecanos
"Crime writer and ladies' man Hector Lassiter (Head Games) makes a return appearance in McDonald's outstanding second series effort. McDonald wows with his writing, which seems effortless despite using many voices, and his book will keep readers rapt." --Library Journal
"In TOROS & TORSOS Craig McDonald takes pop culture, real people and invented action to create a powerful novel of suspense. It gives one the slippery sensation of time-travelling with characters you'd always wished you could meet and suddenly you can. McDonald is knowing and artful, and the suspense pushes at a lovely pace until it starts to stomp like Hemingway on an empty bota." --Daniel Woodrell
"Nothing short of a surrealistic masterwork." --Chicago Tribune
"A bold, ambitious, genre-bending novel from the talented Craig McDonald." --George Pelecanos
"Crime writer and ladies' man Hector Lassiter (Head Games) makes a return appearance in McDonald's outstanding second series effort. McDonald wows with his writing, which seems effortless despite using many voices, and his book will keep readers rapt." --Library Journal
"In TOROS & TORSOS Craig McDonald takes pop culture, real people and invented action to create a powerful novel of suspense. It gives one the slippery sensation of time-travelling with characters you'd always wished you could meet and suddenly you can. McDonald is knowing and artful, and the suspense pushes at a lovely pace until it starts to stomp like Hemingway on an empty bota." --Daniel Woodrell
