Hangman: A Novel

by Daniel Cole

Overview

A detective with no one to trust

A killer with nothing to lose

Detective Emily Baxter is still reeling from the Ragdoll case, and from the disappearance of her friend William “Wolf” Fawkes. Despite her reluctance to jump into another gruesome case, she’s summoned to a meeting of a new FBI/CIA/UK law enforcement task force in New York. There, she is presented with photographs of the latest copycat murder: a body contorted into a familiar pose, strung up from the Brooklyn Bridge, the word “BAIT” carved deep into its chest.

As the media pressure intensifies, Baxter is ordered to assist with the investigation and attend the scene of another murder, again with a victim inscribed with a word—“PUPPET.”

The murders continue to grow in spectacle and depravity on both sides of the Atlantic, and the team helplessly plays catch-up. Baxter must shake off the grief and fear that have paralyzed her for the last year so she can stop another terrible killer before it’s too late.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062653994
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Daniel Cole is the author of Ragdoll, an international bestseller published in nearly forty countries. He lives in Bournemouth, England, where he is at work on another Ragdoll novel.

Editorial Reviews

06/04/2018
Early in Thriller Award–finalist Cole’s fevered sequel to 2017’s Ragdoll, Det. Chief Insp. Emily Baxter, of London’s New Scotland Yard, is visited by CIA agent Damien Rouche and FBI agent Elliot Curtis. They think she might be interested in a recent murder at the Brooklyn Bridge that could be the work of someone copying the notorious serial killer Lethaniel “Ragdoll” Masse, whom she help put behind bars. Baxter protests that she can be of no help in what to her is a clearly unrelated case on the other side of the world, but in the end, of course, she travels to New York, where she joins a team of investigators who get on the trail of copycat killers who have the word puppet carved into their chests. Cole doesn’t hesitate to go over the top, both in terms of the killings and the dialogue (at one point Rouche asks, “How do you catch a killer who’s already dead?”). But this is a book that wears its intentions on its sleeve, and readers going in expecting even more gruesome thrills than Ragdoll will be satisfied. Agents: Esther Newberg and Zoe Sandler, ICM. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2018-05-01
Reluctantly assigned to a joint task force with the FBI and CIA, a British detective must relive the worst case of her career as a copycat killer appears determined to match the prior perp's carnage on both sides of the pond.In this jumbled, excessively violent follow-up to Ragdoll, (2017), DCI Emily Baxter, still smarting from her physical and emotional wounds, wants nothing more to do with the Ragdoll case, allegedly linked to her friend and fellow cop William Fawkes, who's disappeared. But she's given little choice when her boss assigns her to assist FBI Special Agent Elliot Curtis and CIA Special Agent Damien Rouche on a multinational operation after a corpse is found strung up on the Brooklyn Bridge that bears a striking resemblance to the Ragdoll victims. Baxter travels with Curtis and Rouche to New York, where they find that the similarities to the Ragdoll case are superficial and they're looking for someone with a greater reach. Baxter, perpetually the petulant child of the three, seems to want only to drink away her miseries back in London, while Rouche and Curtis have their own agendas. Bodies begin to pile up—some with "bait" and some with "puppet" carved into their chests—and acts of domestic terrorism, from a church massacre to a possible attack on a London Tube station, increase, with the investigators no closer to catching the person, or group, responsible. Cole quickly deflates any suspense he may have built up by the sheer number of grisly incidents he crams into the narrative, making the reader numb or, worse, bored by the loss of life. Even the denouement feels as staged as one of the kills, constructed more to draw attention to the carnage than the story.Forgettable characters slogging, sometimes literally, through a pile of corpses makes for dull reading, even for readers looking for a bloody thrill.

Kirkus Reviews