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
