Hector Lassiter is a crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes. But Hector goes a step beyond: frequently forcing those around him into the tawdry and turbulent territory of his crime stories and novels.

In Toros & Torsos, Hector meets his match in the person of a mysterious killer committed to the craft of murder: a blood-thirsty provocateur who leaves a string of increasingly macabre, homicidal tableaus modeled after seminal works of surrealist art.

This startling novel takes it cue from all-too-real recent scholarship postulating the existence of a dark underground of misogynistic and possibly homicidal surrealist artists, photographers and art collectors that flourished in Europe and United States through most of the Twentieth Century. These extremist surrealists engaged in a parlor game they dubbed “Exquisite Corpse” — a twisted collaborative artistic pursuit that may have found its most infamous and sublime expression in the 1947 murder of would-be actress Elizabeth Short.

Toros & Torsos pits Lassiter, the hard-living pulp author, against the ultimate performance artist in a duel to the death extending across three decades and three continents.

The novel is set against the vivid backdrops of a killer hurricane that nearly destroyed the Florida Keys in 1935, the Spanish Civil War, post-war Los Angeles and the final days of the Batista regime in Cuba.

This wildly original noir saga also boasts a cast of characters including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Man Ray, Salvador Dali and John Huston.

In a blood-limned haze of deception, murderous metaphor and devastating betrayal, nothing is what it seems and obsession and creativity collide in a wicked and unexpected climax that shakes the art world to its foundations.

Sold rights to: France ( Belfond);
Audio book: Recorded Books, USA;
Rights available: Romanian, Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, Moldavian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovenian.
m/s available