Wednesday, May 25, 2016

THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH: COMING THIS FALL

This autumn, Betimes Books will release the climax of the Hector Lassiter series (novel number ten, if you're counting), THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH.

Back when HEAD GAMES was inching toward publication, this novel was conceived and written as the definitive series closer.

(I had this notion, and left myself wiggle room, to expand the series in the middle if it seemed reasonable to do that...the results were THE GREAT PRETENDER and last year's DEATH IN THE FACE.)

THREE CHORDS takes place one calendar year after HEAD GAMES. Like HG, Hector once again narrates, Bud Fiske returns as primary sidekick, and some surprising faces from HG also return.

Information about pre-orders will be forthcoming. In the meantime, here's a brief publisher's teaser:

THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH


In 2007, the Hector Lassiter series launched with Head Games, a literary thriller set along the borderlands of 1957 America—an audacious road novel 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 sets the capstone on the Hector Lassiter saga.

It’s winter, 1958. Johnny Cash and Sun Studios are ascendant in Tennessee, where a wicked snowstorm is doing nothing to cool racial tensions in Music City, USA, or points farther south.

Despite the cold, the U.S. military is also sweating, fearing the worst after a flight crew has been forced to dump a hydrogen bomb off the coast of South Carolina—a weapon of mass destruction whose nuclear trigger has been left to rust at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, threatening the Carolinas with atomic annihilation.

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 internationally bestselling series BookPage has called “wildly inventive” and The Chicago Tribune declared “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.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

THE RUNNING KIND: Paperback/eBook

HEAD GAMES: Paperback/eBook

PRINT THE LEGEND: Paperback/eBook/audio


&
DEATH IN THE FACE
NOW AVAILABLE here