"The year is 1911. Chief Investigator Isaac Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency has had many extraordinary cases before. But none quite like this. Hired to find a young woman named Anna Pape who ran away from home to become an actress, Bell gets a shock when her murdered body turns up instead. Vowing to bring the killer to justice, he begins a manhunt which leads him into increasingly more alarming territory...Anna Pape was not alone in her fate--petite...

The poet: "Our hero is Jack McEvoy, a Rocky Mountain News crime-beat reporter. As the novel opens, Jack's twin brother, a Denver homicide detective, has just killed himself. Or so it seems. But when Jack begins to investigate the phenomenon of police suicides, a disturbing pattern emerges, and soon suspects that a serial murderer is at work--a devious cop killer who's left a coast-to-coast trail of 'suicide notes' drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan...