Ventriloquists

People in Bedfordshire are disappearing. Two teenagers are kidnapped from a rural train station. A baby is taken from an urban market. Another baby is stolen from an encampment of Travellers. Two burglars, who have never met, break into a village home and one dies, killed by a giant wave of sea water that appears from nowhere. All the while a strange man obsesses with making a movie…whatever the cost to those around him. Another man appears to care only about the beautiful birds that he keeps in a cage… But nothing is what it seems.

Ventriloquists is a story about a man who discovers a liminal space between life and death. Around him bad people desperately try to defend their appearance of civility…but to what emotional and physical cost?

What does it mean when kidnappers are kidnapped?
Who are the puppets?
And who are The Ventriloquists?

“David Mathew has always had a talent for getting inside the heads of damaged criminal minds and this novel shows those skills at their peak. Read this book and you’ll be taken to some very disturbing places, in the borderland between the strange and the terrifyingly insane. It might just make you doubt the world around you. It might just make you doubt yourself…

Uncompromising. Moving. Compelling. Ventriloquists gives a raw insight into the dream life of Gangster Britain and the fantasies of captive victims.”