Kirjahaku

It was the shot heard 'round the world: On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway died from a shotgun blast. It's 1965, and two men have come to Ketchum, Idaho to confront the widow Mary Hemingway - men who have serious doubts about the true circumstances of Hemingway's death. One is Hector Lassiter, the oldest and best of Hemingway's friends, the last man standing of the Lost Generation. The other is Hemingway scholar Richard Paulson who sets out to prove that Mary actually murdered her famous husband. Print the Legend is a literary thriller about Hemingway's death and the patina that perceived suicide lends the author's legend, an exploration of the sinister shadow play and co-dependence that binds authors and their academics. It is a love story that finds the aging Hector Lassiter striving to protect the young and pregnant Hannah Paulson as sinister forces gather around her, threatening her and her unborn child. Ingeniously plotted and executed, "Print the Legend" is an epic masterpiece from Craig McDonald. Beginning to end, I was riveted by this story of character, history and intrigue." -Michael Connelly "Hector Lassiter is a compelling character but also a fascinating forum for McDonald's historical, social, and artistic observations. For all the wonderful action, slick dialogue, and plot twists McDonald throws at the reader, he's equally interested in saying something substantial about time and place. Not to be missed." -Michael Koryta "With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance. With "Print the Legend", his triumphant third novel in the series, McDonald cunningly blends high, low and pulp American culture at the mid-century. While the scale is immense, McDonald's hand is deft, and we never forget that, at its center, this is a human story, complex and bruising and deeply felt. As big as the scope, we are never far from the novel's true, pulsing center: the sumptuously etched characters of the widow Mary Hemingway, aspiring writer Hannah Paulson and our beloved Hector himself." -Megan Abbott "McDonald skillfully and ingeniously mixes fact with fiction... McDonald's background as a journalist and crime fiction critic helps him to piece together an intriguing literary thriller." -Mystery Scene

In 2007, the Hector Lassiter series launched with "Head Games", a literary thriller set along the borderlands of 1957 America-a road novel that met with ecstatic reviews and international awards attention, including Edgar and Anthony nominations for Best First Novel by an American Author. With "Three Chords & The Truth", Craig McDonald at last sets the capstone on the Hector Lassiter series and legend. Winter, 1958: Nashville, Tennessee is locked in an icy snow storm doing nothing to cool racial tensions in Music City, USA, or points farther south. Following a midair collision, a U.S. military crew has been forced to dump a hydrogen bomb off the coast of South Carolina-a deadly device still there today, a weapon of mass destruction whose nuclear trigger may be rusting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, potentially still threatening the east coast well into the 21st Century. Once again, forgotten history and historical figures are reanimated and given new life and relevance through the Hector Lassiter series-nothing less than a literary secret history of 20th Century America. In an up-from-the-heels voice that recalls his first-person narration of "Head Games", Hector once again tells his own remarkable story, one that rounds out the saga BookPage has called "wildly inventive" and The Chicago Tribune calls "the most unusual, and readable crime fiction to come along in years." This is a vintage Lassiter novel, at last revealing the ultimate fate of the author-screenwriter famous for living what he wrote and writing about what he lived. " The Lassiter novels] are compelling, thrilling and darkly humorous. Lassiter is a brilliant creation- a crime writer who learned his trade with Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s. He is also a man who seems dangerously prone to violent intrigue, doomed love affairs, tragic marriages and military campaigns (he's a veteran of the Punitive Expedition, World War One, the Spanish Civil War and World War Two). Lassiter witnesses history unfolding and, occasionally, has a role in shaping it course. With "Three Chords and the Truth", Craig McDonald has crafted a remarkable coda to the series." -Steve Powell, The Venetian Vase "With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance." -Megan Abbott "Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down." -Duane Swierczynski

Across nearly a dozen internationally-acclaimed and awards-nominated novels, the Hector Lassiter series has beguiled readers with a secret history of 20th Century crime, politics and the arts.Hector-wanderer, lover and a fiction author frequently described by literary critics as "living what he writes and writing what he lives"-has served as witness and even catalyst to some of his turbulent age's darkest historic and artistic moments.In this last, life-spanning book, Craig McDonald further informs and fits the capstone on the Lassiter saga.Noted acquaintances and "characters" from the previous novels also take their final bows, including Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, for a last, seductive historical romp through the 20th Century and beyond, spanning romantic Ragtime America to our increasingly treacherous digital age.Write from Wrong presents a poignant and provocative portrait of the author not just as a young but also as an old man, yet one always striving to lay down "one true sentence."This is the last installment of McDonald's Edgar/Anthony-awards nominated series, but also stands as an entry point for new readers to experience a crime series BookPage declared "wildly inventive" and The Chicago Tribune the "most unusual, and readable crime fiction to come along in years."