Bøger udgivet af Betimes Books

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

When Manda Ferguson falls out of an apartment window to her death, the story is on all the front pages. But then her death starts to have an effect on the living. Baz: the man accused of killing her has to decide whether or not to turn himself in. Maurice: the taxi driver who inadvertently helped Baz escape wrestles with whether he should mete out his own form of justice. Rachel: the failing election candidate who has to choose between giving up or speaking her mind. Michael: the priest who administered the last rites to Manda and who is finally forced to confront his true (dis)beliefs. Carol: Manda's cousin. A tabloid reporter on the verge of losing her job who begins to discover some curious gaps in her memory... But the effect travels even further than these five intersecting stories when claims are made that Manda's 'spirit' is appearing beneath lampposts. In an economically devastated Ireland, where people have lost faith in politics, in business or religion, each character strives to answer the question: when there's nothing left to believe in, what can we believe? Praise for "The Angel of the Streetlamps" "There is mystery, death and love in The Angel of the Streetlamps; there are wolves and there are sheep. Seán Moncrieff presents us with a cacophony of genuine voices strutting their views on politics, religion and class wars. Moncrieff is a master of the vicious aside, the canny comment and the funny twist, and he brings insight and intelligence to this novel of a damaged, confused and all too recognisable 21st century Ireland." -- Nuala Ní Chonchúir, author of "Mother America" "...The writing is snappy and stylish, and his dialogue is spot-on." --The Irish Examiner "It's thoughtful and dark, even cynical, in its dissection of how a single crime reverberates throughout Irish society." --The Irish Independent "A riveting read." --Tatler

Head Games is equal parts road novel, caper and historical fiction: a black comedy and wistful ballad of lost America rooted in borderland myth and history. Head Games' narrator is Hector Lassiter, now widowed and feeling his age. When Lassiter recovers Mexican General Pancho Villa's skull stolen from his grave by an American soldier-of-fortune, within hours of taking possession of it, Lassiter becomes a target of competing fraternities, Mexican bandits and U.S. intelligence services. The breakneck chase extends across 1957-1970 America - from the cantinas of old Mexico to the Venice, California set of Orson Welles' noir classic Touch of Evil, to the sanctum sanctorum of Yale's infamous Skull and Bones Society. The cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Webb and a young gone-missing National Guardsman named "George W." "Strap in, hold on, enjoy the ride." -San Francisco Chronicle "HEAD GAMES is a gravel and mescal cocktail, a one-day burn, a novel of genuine piss and vinegar, the kind of book you thrust on people with the wild eyes and intent of a PCP freak." -Ray Banks

This unique Christmas collection, published by Betimes Books to celebrate our first year of publishing, showcases nine stories from our authors, debut novelists and established writers.These stories will take you from today's New York to 1970's Indonesia, from Paris in the Roaring Twenties to the Mexican border in 2014, from Kansas City in 1935 to the post-Celtic Tiger Killarney. Some are heart-warming. Some explore the darkest side of the Season. Some will make you laugh. Some might make you cry. All will make you think.

December 1950: A killer blizzard is smothering the Midwest. America is staggering into the Korean War and a Tennessee Senator has the nation riveted by his anticipated televised grilling of mob kingpins-a public spectacle and galling embarrassment to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who has steadfastly denied the existence of the Mafia. In a snowbound hotel bar, crime novelist Hector Lassiter is reunited with old friend Jimmy Hanrahan, an Irish cop committed to catching the one criminal who got away. Jimmy's in pursuit of America's most macabre serial killer-the so-called "Torso Slayer" or "Cleveland Headhunter"-a prankish psychotic who has long eluded capture by Jimmy and famed "Untouchable" Eliot Ness. Hector and Jimmy's reunion is interrupted when a young girl tugs on Hector's sleeve and says, "Please, mister-my mommy needs help." The little girl drags Hector and Jimmy from the bar into a deadly crossfire and cross-country chase-pursued by mobsters, corrupt cops, disgruntled federal officials, a fearsome bounty hunter and an army of rogue private investigators. Hector, the maverick, ever "the running kind," is also confronted with the woman who may be his salvation-the one who offers a prospect of the settled life that has so long eluded Hector, if he can survive through to the New Year. Along the snowbound back roads of lost America, Hector and Jimmy face devastating betrayals, duplicitous women and the prospect of near-certain death in the deserts of Mexico. Hector and Jimmy find themselves locked into a history-changing death race that tests their friendship and bring them in contact with a cast of 20th-Century notables including crooner/mob schmoozer Frank Sinatra and his sultry, soon-to-be wife, Ava Gardner. The Running Kind expertly blends fact and fiction for a darkly humorous, hard-boiled rollick that evokes the feel and pace of Craig McDonald's highly acclaimed, Edgar & Anthony-nominated debut novel (and forthcoming graphic novel) Head Games. *** "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

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

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 Brazil. A dazzling fusion of crime fiction and espionage thriller, Roll the Credits is also a haunting study of the birth of film noir and the bloody underbelly of cinematic history, with a supporting cast including icons of the Lost Generation and heroes of the French resistance *** "A writer of truly unique voice, approach, and ambition, Craig McDonald delivers again with "Roll the Credits". 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

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 and unexpected climax that shakes the art world to its foundations. Life imitating art... art imitating death, and for some, it isn't truly art until somebody dies. "Nothing short of a surrealistic masterwork." -Chicago Tribune

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 "The Key West Clubber." When one of the Clubber's murders hits too close to home, the newlyweds begin to poke around the crimes. What they find casts doubt on the possibility of a single culprit. By turns sexy, sly and sinister, Forever's Just Pretend barrels along at a page-turning pace to a shattering conclusion that casts new light on Hector Lassiter and his legend. "I loved Brinke Devlin the first time she came on the page and I loved her at the end, too. She's a fascinating character." -James Sallis, author of DRIVE

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 Devlin. Soon, Hector and Brinke are tangled not only under the sheets, but in a web of murders, each more grisly than the next. "An amazing (and very smart) montage of mystery, murder, meta-fiction, and literary-history, quite unlike anything I've read before." -Craig Holden

"Central Park West Trilogy" includes three novels originally published separately and collected for the first time in a single volume. Postmodern fables, dark, shocking, perversely funny, wickedly astute, and compulsively readable, they share Kalich's ferocious energy and unique vision. Together, they break down standard notions of plot, character and form a body of work that is distinctive and brilliant. "The Nihilesthete" (nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award, The Hemingway Award, a National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize) introduces us to Kalich's dark world, where a spiritually desolate caseworker plays increasingly sadistic games with a limbless, speechless idiot with a painter's eye. This enigmatic physically diminished esthete will reveal not only his true essence, but the very center of what it means to be human. "Penthouse F" is a cautionary tale that takes the form of an inquiry into the suicide-or murder?-of a young boy and girl in the Manhattan penthouse of a writer named Richard Kalich. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, kindness and cruelty, love and obsession, guilt and responsibility, writer and character, "Penthouse F" is a critical examination of an increasingly voyeuristic society, a metafiction where Kalich the writer, Kalich the person and Kalich the character all merge together, as the reader must pick through the confusion to discover the truth. "Charlie P" dispenses with a conventional narrative altogether, as we follow the comic misadventures of a singularly unique, comic and outlandish Everyman. At age three, when his father dies, he decides to overcome mortality by becoming immortal: by not living his life, he will live forever. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis's Babbit and Forrest Gump, Charlie P, while asocial and alienated, is, at the same time, at the heart of the American dream. "Richard Kalich is after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one's culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream." -Brian Evenson "Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent." -Electronic Book Review "Kalich represents the best in contemporary fiction. He has every chance to become-why not? -a living classical author." -Hooligan Literary Magazine "The Nihilesthete is a brilliant, hammer-hitting, lights-out novel." -Los Angeles Times "One of the most powerfully written books of the decade." -San Francisco Chronicle "A tour de force... equals the best work of playwright Sam Shepard." -Columbus Post-Dispatch "Penthouse F is akin to the best work of Paul Auster in terms of its readability without sacrificing its intelligence of experiment. [...] Kalich delivers afresh, relevant, and enticingly readable work of metafiction." -American Book Review "Ghosts haunt this book from first page to last: Dostoevsky, Mallarme, Kafka, Mann, Camus, Pessoa, Gombrowicz--and, oh yes, most perniciously of all, "Kalich." -Warren Motte, World Literature Today "If one of the great European intransigents of the last century-say, Franz Kafka or Georges Bataille or Witold Gombrowicz-were around to write a novel about our era of reality TV and the precession of simulacra, the era of Big Brother and The Real World, what would it look like? Well, it might look like Richard Kalich's Penthouse F..." -Brian McHale "With his continuous comic exaggeration, Kalich is able to describe, highly uniquely, the overwhelming, vertiginous, risky sensation of being alive." -American Book Review "I would rather that the familiar be embraced and the novel resonate beyond itself and intone the spheres of Plato and Beckett. Charlie P resonates." -Review of Contemporary Fiction

A long-missing novelist, a string of murders and a new brand of heroine fire Permanent Fatal Error, a sexy, Hitchcockian literary thriller. Everett Hyde: a reclusive cult-writer extraordinaire, once regarded as the voice of his generation, now presumed dead. Chase Alger: an award-wining biographer specializing in studies of famous people-writers all-who've come to mysterious ends; a self-made man with his own ambiguous past. Ashley McKnight: Chase's lover, an aspiring young novelist. When Chase receives an offer to write Everett Hyde's first sanctioned biography, and Ashley agrees to accompany him to the remote estate of the mysterious author's equally reclusive daughter, sinister things begin happening around them...

Kansas City, 1935. Emmett Whelan, an idealistic county prosecutor who has left behind his Irish roots and married into the country club set, takes on the city's corrupt political machine when he investigates the brutal murder of a black musician. As Emmett probes the case and meets another outsider, a black jazz singer Arlene Gray, he discovers the city's underbelly of racism and criminality. His personal life deteriorates. The closer he gets to the heart of the corruption, the more he sees that it is deeper and closer than he has ever suspected. And when the truth unfolds - about the killings, the machine, Emmett's wife - a surprising and devastating climax reverberates at every level of the city. "Reach the Shining River" is an urban crime drama about money, race, and class. Tense and full of memorable characters, it has the smell of a big river, the atmosphere of 1930s America, and a soundtrack that is pure jazz and blues. "With the rhythm and cadence of the prose, echoing the blues soundtrack that underscored the whole book, Stevens easily achieved that balance between crime fiction and literary fiction due to his exceptional characterization and engaging prose." -Raven Crime Reads

Picturesque Killarney might seem the perfect place to enjoy the rare gift of sun but the town has got the blues. Bernard Dunphy, eccentric jarvey and guitarist, is pining for his unrequited love and has to contend with an ailing mother and an ailing horse. His troubled friend Jack gets embroiled in a violent crime. A trio of girlfriends becomes entangled in the terrible webs of their own making. The novel fluctuates between darkness and light as the protagonists struggle with their inner demons. Can friendship, love and music save their sinking souls? "Colin O'Sullivan writes with a style and a swagger all his own. His voice - unique, strong, startlingly expressive - both comes from and adds to Ireland's long and lovely literary lineage. Like many of that island's sons and daughters, O'Sullivan sends language out on a gleeful spree, exuberant, defiant, ever-ready for a party. Only a soul of stone could resist joining in." - Niall Griffiths

It's December 1975 and seventeen-year-old Francesca is about to find out if that which does not kill her will make her strong. Caught in the crossfire of the Indonesian army's brutal invasion of East Timor, she escapes with her life and little else. Arriving on the shores of Indonesian Borneo, she finds herself thrust into an ersatz American small town carved out of the jungle by Constar Oil of Texas.Interwoven in Francesca's journey are a cast of vividly drawn characters - the bored expat brat who befriends her, a divorced fundamentalist missionary bringing Christ to the jungle via Oklahoma, the inept son of a murdered socialist martyr, a former Vietnam War helicopter pilot, an amah who supplements her income turning tricks... Watching over them all is the menacing former Colonel Benny Surikano, Constar's Mr. Fixit to whom everyone turns when they need something.Set against a backdrop of endemic political corruption, moral compromise and the pursuit of oil, Francesca is a passionate story of one woman's struggle against overwhelming odds to shape the country that nearly destroyed her.

A universal tale of escape, love and redemption. A Boston fireman, in an attempt to flee personal and professional tragedy, accepts a job as a bartender on a Greek island. In an isolated cove, he meets Kerryn, an animal rights activist who believes dolphins possess consciousness, intelligence and souls. Kerryn enjoys an extraordinary and personal relationship with a dolphin and is waging a covert war to stop the local fishermen from using illegal nets that not only deplete the sea of fish but also take dolphins' lives. The fireman is pulled into this conflict as his relationship with Kerryn deepens. But Kerryn's passion and convictions lead her to make a fatal decision that changes the island and both their lives forever. The novel's emotional landscape and its themes of environmentalism, animal rights, and the costs of capitalism make The Last Island both timely and timeless.

Some will do anything to see her fall... Kat Connelly, innovative designer and introspective daughter of an Irish farmer, is disappointed with her first job in fashion. She copies catwalk looks for the enigmatic Lynda Wynter, who runs a small label in London and relies on two things to survive: self-medication and cheap Chinese production. Kat feels the lure of a higher aesthetic beckoning and escapes to Milan. As Italy's imminent smoking ban looms darkly over the land, Kat's personal world lights up: design and beauty are all around, dazzling and seducing, not to mention the overwhelming Italian male libido. She has claimed her slice of the bella vita and with it a sense of belonging she has yearned for since childhood. Of course, the bella vita comes at a price. When Kat is invited into the impenetrable House of Adriani to design their high-profile collection, she throws a cast-iron hierarchy into turmoil...