Dr. Skull

When a motorman runs a red signal, a broker hands a stranger ten thousand dollars, and the Mayor speaks a ransom's ultimatum with another man's voice, New York thinks it's facing a spree of madness. It's not madness. It's Dr. Skull.

Bob Larkin, a young Madison Avenue copywriter, and Paula Lansdowne, daughter of the celebrated psychologist Alfred Lansdowne, are drawn into a campaign of psychic terror that will shred the city's nerves. As the killings mount and officials falter, Lansdowne confronts a darker possibility: an occult mastery of the mind unlike any modern hypnotism, wielded by a criminal who sees through other people's eyes and speaks through their mouths. With the city's power centers under threat, the trio must race past police bluster and public panic, trace a vanished genius to the heart of an ancient brotherhood, and find a way to fight a will that turns sane men into instruments of murder.

Equal parts detective procedural, pulp thriller, and occult thriller, Dr. Skull is a high-voltage serial thriller about power, persuasion, and the price a city pays when someone learns how to move its people like chessmen.