Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Head Games
Author: Craig McDonald
Narrator: Tom Stechschulte
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-30-09
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 21 votes
Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Suspense
Publisher's Summary:
Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist whose fiction has graced numerous anthologies of crime noir. Set in 1957, Head Games is a quirky, action-packed caper hailed as a "fun, deft debut" (Publishers Weekly).
Critic Reviews:
"This slick caper novel touches chords of myth, history, loss and redemption just enough so you can hear echoes faintly under the gunfire." (
Publishers Weekly)"There's even a cameo from a callow, foul-mouthed Skull and Bones initiate named "George W." Much of Head Games reads like a picaresque adventure, but McDonald's portraits of Welles, Dietrich, and Pancho Villa are beguiling and seem knowing. This one is simply great fun!" (
Booklist)
Members Reviews:
Writers, Guns, and Skulls! with apologies to Warren Zevon
Head Games (a 2008 multiple award nominee) features Hector Lassiter, a two-fisted writer for Black Mask, who lives a gonzo noir existence reminiscent of the Thompson Boys, Jim and Hunter.
The tale opens in 1957. Lassiter has dragged a young writer, sent to interview him, to a cantina south of the border where an old acquaintance needs his help in dealing with the MacGuffin of the story: Pancho Villa's skull. Their tete-a-tete about Villa's tete is interrupted by a shoot-out with the federales. And then ... things get weird.
Take a trunkful of skulls, the federales, a secret society, the CIA, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, the progenitor of a presidential dynasty, and more historical figures, mix liberally with guns, cigarettes, booze, car chases, and an escalating body count and you are just beginning to get an idea of what is in store for you (and Lassiter) in Head Games.
McDonald, who cites Lester Dent among his influences, manages to provide an action-packed tale full of twists and turns that never lets up while still delivering multiple conspiracies, a history lesson or two, and a look at the onion layers of the writer's mind and tortured soul that hides beneath Lassiter's hard-boiled exterior. He does all of this with a dark humor-tinged full bore voice and style (Lassiter's) that is pure new pulp: a truly modern novel that will remind everyone of what attracted them to the pulps in the first place.
The character of Lassiter shares traits with Hemingway but seems to be more directly influenced by a couple of other writers that may be familiar to pulp readers, Brett Halliday/Davis Dresser (creator of Mike Shayne) and Jonathan Latimer (creator of Bill Crane). It is the latter influence that adds a slight touch of screwball comedy to this volatile cocktail of tale. It is the former who, like Lassiter, lied about his age to ride with Black Jack Pershing.
Head Games is the first, but chronologically the second, in a planned series of seven Hector Lassiter novels. Three others, Toros and Torsos, Print the Legend, and One True Sentence are in print with Forever is Just Pretend coming next.
Loved It
Craig McDonald has written nine books so far featuring his series " hero" Hector Lassiter a pulp novelist, friend to many historical personages of the mid twentieth century and all around adventurer( maybe a cross between the cult author James Crumley and the hard boiled actor Lee Marvin). This pulp adventure, which includes cameos by Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich and George Bush, senior and junior, is just plain fun and cool. Buying them all.
