Monday, April 11, 2011

Meet the Authors Tonight In What Might Well Be Our First TC Fight Night

Heads You Lose
New York Times-bestselling author Lisa Lutz conspires with-or should we say against?-coauthor David Hayward to write an original and hilarious tag-team crime novel. 
 
Meet Paul and Lacey Hansen: orphaned, pot-growing twentysomething siblings eking out a living in rural Northern California. When a headless corpse appears on their property, they can't exactly dial 911, so they move the body and wait for the police to find it. Instead, the corpse reappears, a few days riper . . . and an amateur sleuth is born. Make that two.


When collaborators Lutz and Hayward (former romantic partners) start to disagree about how the story should unfold, the body count rises, victims and suspects alike develop surprising characteristics (meet Brandy Chester, the stripper with the Mensa IQ), and sibling rivalry reaches homicidal intensity. Think Adaptation crossed with Weeds. Will the authors solve the mystery without killing each other first?

Jackie says:
"This is Lutz's first stand alone since The Spellman files, and it's certainly a lot different.  It's an experiment of sorts--she's written half the chapters and a poet and ex-boyfriend of hers David Hayward  has written the other half.  The deal was that they write "blind", not making an outline or even speaking to each other directly about the project.  They allowed them on short note to each other at the end of  every chapters as well as some commentary footnotes, but they couldn't edit each others' work.  It certainly made for an interesting, if disjointed, read.  There is no getting lost in the mystery because it was really two stories-- one being the murder mystery involving a headless corpse found by a pot growing mismatch of brother and sister and the hilarity of amateur investigations in small towns,the other was Lisa and David snarking at each other throughout the book, sabotaging characters and plot lines at every opportunity.  It is an entertaining and unique read that may surprise her fans, but was an interesting introduction to Lutz for me."


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