Broken Doll Books in Order

The Broken Doll collection is a four‑part sequence of short thrillers that read like a tightly constructed mini‑series. Each story stands on its own, but together they trace a violent arc involving a sadistic crime boss, the people caught in his orbit, and the law‑enforcement officer determined to bring him down.

The sequence begins with The Pain Hunter. A jailbreak in Wisconsin spills into a street fair, and in the chaos a wounded cartel leader named Paul Offenbach forces a country doctor, Stuart Collier, to treat him on the run. Trapped in a speeding van with a man who enjoys other people’s suffering, Collier has to decide how far his oath to do no harm really extends—and whether he can outthink a patient who would kill him without blinking.

In Dodge, we see Offenbach from a different angle. A female deputy has been tortured and murdered, and Special Agent Constant Marlowe is working off the books to avenge her friend. The killer hides in plain sight and has local officials under his thumb. As Marlowe closes in, the story becomes a cat‑and‑mouse chase on rural roads and backwoods hideouts, with both hunter and hunted setting traps.

Execution Day shifts the spotlight to a small‑town prosecutor convinced that a seemingly ordinary family man helped Offenbach commit his crimes. The courtroom becomes a battleground between a D.A. who fears letting a killer go free and a defense attorney determined to tear his case apart. Questions about evidence, motive and doubt keep the reader guessing whose version of events is closest to the truth.

By Sixty‑One Seconds, the pieces collide. An extradition hearing, a crowded courthouse, and a street fair outside provide the stage for a final, desperate play by Offenbach. Constant Marlowe’s pursuit reaches a breaking point as a single violent minute threatens to undo months of work and put innocent people in the crosshairs.

What makes the Broken Doll stories stand out is the way Deaver uses different viewpoints—a hostage doctor, an avenging agent, a conflicted prosecutor—to circle the same core villain and questions of justice and revenge. Read straight through, the collection delivers the same layered tension and twists as one of his novels, compressed into four brutal, tightly wound acts.