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 actually having killed. "The Great Pretender" fits the capstone on the Lassiter/Welles legend, spanning their decades-long, uneasy association from the run-up to Welles' infamous War of the Worlds "Panic Broadcast of 1938" to the set of the noir classic "The Third Man" and the ruins of post-war Vienna. The novel finds the actor and author in a race for a lost holy relic promising its possessor infinite power but a ghastly death if lost. Hector and Orson's competitors in their quest for the 'Spear of Destiny' or 'Holy Lance' include German occultists, members of the Third Reich, a sensuous Creole Voodoo priestess and a strangely obsessed J. Edgar Hoover. Drawing on dark historical legend and rich in atmosphere and character, The Great Pretender is the latest instalment in the series BookPage called "wildly inventive" and The Chicago Tribune declared the "most unusual, and readable" crime fiction "to come along in years." *** Praise "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 "What critics might call eclectic, and Eastern folks quirky, we Southerners call cussedness -- and it's the cornerstone of the American genius. As in: "There's a right way, a wrong way, and my way." You want to see how that looks on the page, pick up any of Craig McDonald's novels. He's built him a nice little shack out there way off all the reg'lar roads, and he's brewing some fine, heady stuff. Leave your money under the rock and come back in an hour." -James Sallis "Craig McDonald is wily, talented and - rarest of the rare - a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either." -Laura Lippman "James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald." -Amazon.fr