Heads You Lose

Lisa Lutz is the bestselling author of comedic crime novels The Spellman Files. Her ex-boyfriend David Hayward is a freelance editor and poet who has never published a novel. Together, they have written a murder mystery like no other. Lutz and Hayward took turns writing chapters, reading each chapter “blind” and making comments by way of footnotes and short letters to each other at the end of each chapter. The result is a hilarious and unique novel with more twists than a roller coaster.

In Heads You Lose, Paul and Lacey Hansen are orphaned twenty-something siblings who grow pot in their basement and distribute it to local colleges and nursing homes. A headless corpse is dumped in their yard and they embark on a search to find out first, who the body is, and second, who left it in their yard. As they find themselves in the middle of the investigation they also discover their parents’ death may not have been an accident. If the premise alone doesn’t sound wacky enough, there’s also blackmail, amazing back-from-the-dead recoveries, strippers who belong to MENSA and ridiculous made-up TV shows. Soon the victims start piling up and the list of suspects grows and shrinks as Lutz and Hayward work their way to an ending that’s as clever and satisfying as they get.

If you like zany comedies, murder mysteries that have more red herrings than real suspects and peeking in on the writing process, check out Heads You Lose. You won’t be disappointed.

Nancy would be more than a little freaked out to find a headless corpse in her yard. She writes about her 2 boys and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys.