Print the Legend — Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald's debut, Head Games, a relentlessly slick and action packed literary caper novel, was shortlisted for the Edgar, Anthony, Crimespress and Gumshoe awards for Best First Novel. Now, with Print the Legend, McDonald exceeds the extraordinary promise of his debut, delivering a consummate mystery about a conspiracy gone wrong, and the outer edges of creative jealousy and obsessive revenge.

It was the shot heard around the world: On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway died from a shotgun blast to the head... 4 years later, two men have come to Idaho to confront the widow Hemingway -- men who have doubts about the circumstances of Hemingway's death. One is crime novelist Hector Lassiter, the oldest and best of Hem's friends...the last man standing of the Lost Generation. Hector has heard rumors of some surviving Hemingway manuscripts: a "lost" chapter of A Moveable Feast and a full-length novel written by a deluded Hemingway that Hector fears might compromise his own reputation. The other man is professor Richard Paulson, who along with his pregnant wife Hannah, herself an aspiring writer, is bent on proving that Mary Hemingway murdered Papa. As Hector digs into the mystery of Hemingway's lost writings, he uncovers an audacious, decades-long conspiracy tied to the emergent art movements of 1920's Paris, the most duplicitous of Cold War espionage tactics, and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI...