Paris, 1924: a city teeming with would-be poets, writers, painters and publishers... the Lost Generation. Hector Lassiter, fledgling author and best friend of Ernest Hemingway, is crossing the Pont Neuf when he hears a body fall into the icy Seine - the first in a string of brutal murders of literary magazine editors that throw a shroud over the City of Light. Frantic to stop the killings, the literati form their own improbable vigilante band: Gertrude Stein gathers the most prominent crime and mystery writers in the city, including Hector and the dark, mysterious mystery novelist Brinke...

Key West, 1925: the USA's southernmost point and the most un-American of American locales; a rowdy border town surrounded by water and populated by sports fishermen, naval veterans and Cuban revolutionists - misfits and mavericks, all. After several years abroad, crime writer Hector Lassiter arrives on "Bone Key" to reunite with his lost love Brinke Devlin, a fellow author and the woman destined to become the first Mrs. Lassiter. Hector finds an island in turmoil - beset by fatal fires and savage attacks against women that the local press attributes to a baseball bat-wielding fiend dubbed...

Hector Lassiter is a crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes, frequently forcing 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: a 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...

World War II: the last good fight. In his own words, novelist Hector Lassiter confides the secret history of his clandestine campaigns in the European theatre and beyond, and his long, bloody battle of wits against a Nazi filmmaker. Aided by a beautiful OSS operative and a two-fisted Irish cop-turned-Army intelligence officer, Hector takes on the impossible mission of smuggling a hard-hunted Jewish orphan from France while pursued by the might of Germany's occupying army. The high-stakes chase extends from decadent Berlin to occupied France, from post-war Hollywood to the steaming jungles of...

Nazis, black magic and secret history collide in Craig McDonald's The Great Pretender. In 2007, McDonald launched the Hector Lassiter series with the Edgar Award-nominated debut, "Head Games," pairing the globetrotting, larger-than-life crime novelist with equally legendary filmmaker and amateur magician Orson Welles. McDonald's international bestselling and critically acclaimed follow-up, "Toros & Torsos," extended the story of Hector and Orson's uneasy friendship while exploring the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called 'Black Dahlia', whom some came to suspect Welles of...