Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

Overview

The New Jersey State Police had started calling him Howdy Doody, after the famous TV puppet of the 1950s. Three people killed in northern New Jersey, then three in Manhattan and another in the Bronx, in a thirteen-month period. And all of them hung up with strings attached to their limbs, like puppets. Finally the murderer was caught in New York City. Or so it seems-until State Police detective Mo Ford finds another victim, killed and arranged in exactly the same way. Is it a copycat crime, or did the police catch the wrong man? Mo's theory about what happened soon expands to involve U.S. intelligence agencies and a horrific experiment with human beings. With so many forces behind the scenes, who is the real puppet master?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596918009
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/11/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Daniel Hecht is the author of the bestselling Skull Session and Puppets; The Babel Effect; and two novels in the Cree Black series, City of Masks and Land of Echoes. He lives in Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

Part medical investigation, part Gothic chiller, with a singularly explosive ending.”

Mail on Sunday

Four stars! Puppets is a fast, intriguing story bolstered by real substance in its study of the dodgy things governments do…Combined with the mind games of a classic manhunt and a splash of romance, it’s got pretty much all you could ask for. Excellent stuff!”

London Daily Mirror

A first-rate thriller with a killer combination of wit, grit, and gore.”

Booklist (starred review)

"Four stars! Puppets is a fast, intriguing story bolstered by real substance in its study of the dodgy things governments do...Combined with the mind games of a classic manhunt and a splash of romance, it''s got pretty much all you could ask for. Excellent stuff!"

Daily Mirror

It’s not as gore-filled as Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith (Harper, 2003), but it’s close. Mo Ford is a veteran New York State Police homicide detective hunting a killer who strings his victims on wires like marionettes. Weary and run-down from his own personal and professional baggage, Ford pegs the killer as copycatting the Howdy Doody murderer who was put away years ago. Or was he? How could a copycat know about the same kinds of knots to use? Alarm bells go off for Ford when he’s ordered to report his findings to an FBI agent. The more he intuits, the more he suspects an inside job, or at least one related to some old military mind-control experiments gone awry. (Think about it: puppets are the last word in “control.”) While Hecht provides enough gross-out details to satisfy any torture-porn seeker, this is no schloxploitation but a riveting, well-paced mystery. Hecht’s novels starring psychic/psychiatrist/sleuth, Cree Black (Land of Echoes, City of Masks, and Bones of the Barbary Coast) are also well worth reading.

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