When DW Jordan’s Pawns of the Puppets opens with a soldier-turned-terrorist, the event isn’t treated as an act of betrayal — it’s a trigger. What follows across two novels is a slow, methodical descent into something more disturbing than a single character arc.
Written across two volumes — The Game of Chaos and its sequel The Order Behind the Chaos — the series takes place during the early years of FBI psychological profiling, in a Cold War landscape where paranoia wasn’t a byproduct, but a design choice. The books aren’t interested in traditional villainy. Jordan’s focus is on machinery: how individuals can be shaped, misdirected, and ultimately weaponized.
There are no capes, no hero speeches. Just a chilling proposition: that control can be executed invisibly. And worse, that it already is.
Beneath the Narrative
The first book builds its plot around Paul Malin, a soldier whose sudden descent into terrorism prompts an investigation with more unknowns than answers. Rather than present a tidy narrative, Jordan leans into ambiguity. As the layers unfold, the question shifts from “What happened to him?” to “What was he built for?”
The pacing is deliberate. Readers follow investigators down a psychological rabbit hole where the conventional logic of motive doesn’t apply. Instead, the novel suggests that motive itself can be engineered — along with identity, loyalty, even memory.
What’s most unnerving is that Jordan doesn’t stretch far into fantasy to make it work. The methods he explores — behavioral conditioning, psychological isolation, manipulation through media and authority — are real enough to make the fiction feel like a dramatized case study.
Systems, Not Villains
The sequel pulls the camera back. The Order Behind the Chaos introduces a larger structure, an underground framework designed not only to create people like Malin but to mass-produce them. In this vision, future world leaders are shaped in hidden facilities through a fusion of ancient psychological strategies and modern perception management.
It’s not just the manipulation of individuals anymore. It’s the optimization of instability for the benefit of those behind the curtain.
The novel balances tightly between thriller and allegory. Jordan doesn’t offer easy targets. There’s no single antagonist pulling strings, just a system, functioning efficiently, with the kind of plausible deniability that echoes real-world bureaucracies.
What results is fiction that doesn’t scream “conspiracy,” but rather whispers, “Here’s how it could happen.”
Adaptation Potential
There’s a cinematic rhythm to both books — tight chapters, psychological tension, and deliberate ambiguity that would lend itself well to a limited series format. The tone recalls the slow-burn dread of Mindhunter and the systemic cynicism of The Manchurian Candidate. Not necessarily a mainstream blockbuster, but precisely the kind of psychological thriller that streaming platforms like to take risks on, especially those courting a cerebral, conspiratorial audience.
What sets it apart isn’t the twists, but the framing. Pawns of the Puppets doesn’t ask whether control is possible. It assumes it is, and then it explores what happens when it’s scaled.