The Poetic Killer: An Adrian Vail Novel

By C.W. Haldon

When eighty-four-year-old Dorothy Whitcomb is found dead inside a Pittsburgh senior-living community, the scene has been deliberately arranged: twelve shoes surround her body, an unmistakable echo of a childhood rhyme from a residents' memory project.

Adrian Vale is brought in as an outside consultant, much to homicide detective Tessa Moretti's irritation. Vale sees what others might miss-but he also knows that a pattern can become dangerous when investigators, reporters, and the public begin feeding it.

Then the deaths continue.

As nursery rhymes become attached to new victims and media attention turns the investigation into a public spectacle, Vale and Moretti must separate evidence from interpretation, motive from coincidence, and what the killer intended from what everyone else has helped create.

Because the most dangerous clue may not be the one left at the crime scene.

It may be the story people decide to tell about it.

The Poetic Killer is an Adrian Vale mystery about murder, misdirection, institutional assumptions, and the seductive certainty of a pattern that seems to explain everything.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKLQ1SFS
• ISBN13: 9798176233162
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"