TOROS & TORSOS The new Hector Lassiter novel (Coming this fall) "This is granite poetry in all its stone glory."    — KEN BRUEN, PRIEST "Deftly mixes myth, history... McDonald's imaginative tale takes an enjoyably different approach to art and murder."    — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Read more praise here. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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… Read an excerpt here. IndieBound (support your local bookstore) Amazon (hardcover) Amazon (trade paperback) Bleak House Books hardcover, September 2008: ISBN-13: 978-1-60648-000-7 Bleak House Books trade paperback, September 2008: ISBN-13: 978-1-60648-001-4 Evidence Collection, September 2008: ISBN-13: 978-1-60648-002-1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SEE THE BOOK TRAILERS HERE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PRAISE FOR TOROS & TORSOS "A bold, ambitious, genre-bending novel from the talented Craig McDonald."    — GEORGE PELECANOS, THE TURNAROUND "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, WINTER'S BONE "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 "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 "Wanna feel some American history? Read Toros & Torsos...a scary trip down memory lane with Papa Hemingway, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and a group of artists unable to distinguish the real from the surreal. Your guide for this cross-continent chase is the honorable, loveable and fearless Hector Lassiter. McDonald shoots to the top of the crime writing heap with this well-researched and excellently written masterpiece of Americana."    — CHARLIE STELLA, MAFIYA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Published by Bleak House Books