Heads You Lose

For Lacey Hansen getting out of the small town she lives in is easier said then done. She lives in her childhood home with her brother Paul and together they grow marijuana in the basement. As she's throwing out the trash late one night Lacey hears a large swarm of flies and wanders over to investigate what she thinks might be a deer. Turns out its a headless body. Unable to call the cops because of their side business Lacey and Paul devise their own solution to the problem but that just sends them on an unbelievably wild adventure.

This book was a collaboration between Best Selling author Lisa Lutz and her ex-boyfriend David Hayward. Their interaction is just as much a part of the novel as the storyline itself. They each take turns show more writing a chapter and at the end of each one there are messages to each other that are freaking hilarious!! There are also footnotes written by the reading author throughout the book that are laugh out loud funny. Don't even get me started on chapter 14, PURE GENIUS!! I highly recommend this book if you love comedy mixed in with murder, blackmail, drug dealing and other bad deeds. show less

Collabs are tough even under the best of circumstances, and generally the alternating chapter format is best left as a creative writing exercise. Even more so when the two authors are antagonistic rather than collaborative and seem to really despise each other.

As a result, the actual story isn't anything special, but the two sniping at each other, both in direct communications that bookend each chapter and in the text itself, is a masterclass in highly aggressive passive-aggressiveness. It's almost uncomfortable at times, and they probably should not have any contact after this, but the results are fascinating and entertaining as they wage their battle in wits, words, subtext, insults veiled and direct, and via blatant manipulation of show more the plot itself. show less

What a hilarious novel.

If anyone has any questions regarding how collaborations work - this is certainly a good look at that. Lisa Lutz and David Hayward trade off on who writes each chapter - and then leave notes for one another throughout the book. The way that Lisa and David work together, and fail to work together, becomes more and more clear as the book begins its slow implosion into hilarity and nonsense. Need I say it doesn't make a great deal of sense?

The pleasure in reading this comes in a rather meta way. Characters are tortured and ruined in order to piss off the co-author just a little more - threatening notes and overuse of pretentious turns of phrase are emphasized just to grate a little more. The book is laugh out loud show more funny, and more than a little vindictive. What's not to love?

This is arguably one of the best revenge novels out there. It's a pity that it wasn't exactly intended to be that.. show less

Another book based on a rich comic idea from Lisa Lutz, this time in collaboration with David Hayward. The two have written a gently comic murder mystery about a brother and sister living in Northern California and working as pot dealers, who have a headless body show up at their place one day. There's more to it: Lutz and Hayward alternate chapters, and the conceit of the book is that the two are ex-lovers, and the collaboration takes on more and more the tone of a competition, reflected in notes and letters between the two, in footnotes each leave commenting on the other's chapter, in the way Lutz emphasizes the sister Lacey as protagonist and Hayward the brother Paul, and in the escalating manner in which each author attempts to show more undermine the story the other author is trying to develop. One nice thing is that when you buy the book you have the option of designating whether you want your money to go to Lutz's royalties or Hayward's. Okay I made that last part up. show less

I often recommend Lisa Lutz's The Spellmans series to readers who have finished the Stephanie Plum books and are looking for another light hearted fun mystery series.

Heads You Lose is a stand alone book and is a collaboration with David Hayward....who just happens to be Lisa's ex-boyfriend. And it is this connection that makes this book so much fun to read.

So, in the novel, we meet brother and sister Lacey and Paul. They're twenty somethings living in a small town in California. They also grow pot for a living. When a headless corpse appears on their property, chances are it could be work related. But, the ideal thing seems to be to move the body elsewhere to be found given their profession. When the body appears yet again in the front show more yard, Lacey recognizes it this time as her ex-fiancee. Lacey decides to give the sheriff a hand solving the case...with Paul's help of course.

Lisa writes the first chapter and subsequent odd numbered chapters; David does the even numbered. Emails between the co authors preface each chapter and barbed footnotes abound. The subtle sniping between the two is hilarious. Each chapter takes a new direction as characters are added and killed off. (and brought back!) Clues abound as each author tries to steer the direction the book should take by adding their own twists.

"Another idiotic duck reference was all Lacey had to show for her visit with Marybeth Monroe. It was if some outside element were at work, temporarily putting the brakes on her investigation."
The town is populated by wildly quirky characters, seemingly random clues and red herrings galore - a source of contention between Lisa and David as the outcome is not pre determined.

Heads You Lose was such an entertaining, laugh out loud read. I hope the two authors can put their differences aside and collaborate again. No wait....it works much better for us if they don't get along! show less

REVIEW: Heads You Lose
Note: This review originally appeared in The Season E-Zine's April mystery section.

Heads You Lose by Lisa Lutz and David Hayward
Berkley (300 pages)
April 5, 2012

Rating: 4.5/5 (Amazing) (The Season's rating scale now runs from 1 to 5.)

For fans of: Christopher Moore, The Coen Brothers, and Dave Barry

Orphaned twenty-something siblings Paul and Lacey Hansen lead a pretty quiet life. Or rather, they led a pretty quiet life – until the decapitated corpse showed up in their backyard.

Most people would probably call the police if something like that happened to them. Then again, most people don’t have a marijuana farm located in their basement. So Paul and Lacey do what any two rational, legally challenged people in show more their situation would do: they relocate the body under the cover of darkness and leave it for somebody else to find.

That should be that. But then the (ever ripening) dead body reappears in front of their house, and Paul and Lacey are forced to admit that this is a situation they’re going to have to face head-on…

As you may have gathered from the above synopsis, Heads You Lose is a murder mystery. What you may not realize, however, is that it’s also the tale of two exes (crime novelist Lisa Lutz and poet David Hayward) collaborating to write a murder mystery. When they started the project, the pair agreed to alternate chapters (with Lutz writing the odd-numbered chapters and Hayward writing the even) and to refrain from doing any outlining whatsoever. That, it turns out, is all they could agree on, as is evidenced by the hilariously antagonistic e-mail exchanges between the authors (featured at the end of each chapter), the sniping editorial footnotes the two append to each other’s work, the fact that Lutz takes great delight in killing off all of Hayward’s favorite characters, and Hayward’s attempt to paint Lutz into a corner before leaving her to write the final chapter. If the Editor’s Note is to be believed, when the book was finished, the authors refused to come together on revisions, so the manuscript was published in its original form. As the Note says, “[w]hile unorthodox in structure, it is nevertheless a novel. It just happens to tell more stories than either author intended.” Indeed.

This is a book that succeeds on every level. Yes, the attempted collaboration between Lutz and Hayward is endlessly entertaining; watching the two of them battle for control over the novel will fill you with a perverse sort of glee, and every time you stumble across an in-story pot-shot, you’ll feel like you’ve just won a game of literary Where’s Waldo?

But the mystery they’ve crafted is incredibly compelling, as well. I mean, okay, the plot is wild and woolly and takes more turns than a driver at Indy, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work. For all their literary shenanigans (and the resulting epically high body count), the characters are incredibly well developed, there’s a very clear through-line to Lutz and Hayward’s story, and the ending is nothing short of genius.

Read this book. Do it now. And prepare to enjoy the hell out of the experience. show less

I really loved this. There's 2 stories going on here - the co-authors (and exes) are writing every other chapter and then there's the actual fictional story they are composing together. With occasional footnotes and letters back and forth after each chapter, the whole thing is pretty funny. One author loves a character a little too much, so the other kills them off - in one case to be resurrected again by the other. Then there's the cat.

Anyway, the story itself would be pretty lame without this humorous framework of the co-authors. But knowing these characters are doing things to spite the other author and that it ends up being a bit of a farce of bad whodunit movies absolutely makes it worth the read.