Head Games

July 16, 2007
In McDonald’s fun, deft debut, set mostly in 1957, Sen. Prescott Bush has sent out the call: bring me the head of Pancho Villa, the late Mexican revolutionary. Aging writer Hector Mason Lassiter, author of pulp novels like The Land of Fear and Dread
and Border Town
, gets caught in the crossfire between Mexican nationalists and frat boys out to place Villa’s head in Yale’s Skull and Bones Society trophy case. Along the road to hell, Lassiter picks up a young love interest while dropping in on Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich on the set of Touch of Evil
, but that doesn’t slow down the action (“it’s a tricky thing, firing for flesh wounds with a machine gun at close range”). Reminiscent of James Crumley’s Milo Milodragovich PI novels but Crumley lite, this slick caper novel touches chords of myth, history, loss and redemption just enough so you can hear echoes faintly under the gunfire.