House of Vale: The Selection, a Thriller by Patrick Perrine
A Five-Book Psychological Thriller · Book One
HOUSE
OF VALE
The Selection
Power isn't given. It's selected.
Adrian Vale built his life on the belief that he was the author of it. He was being read the entire time.
Available September 2026 · Hardcover · eBook · Audiobook
The Premise
Some systems don't need to be seen. They just need to be obeyed.
Adrian Vale is a master of control — from the quiet affluence of San Diego to the high-stakes rooms where power is felt but rarely spoken. He manipulates people, pressure, and outcomes with flawless precision. Until he discovers someone else is pulling his strings.
A trip back to his Minnesota hometown cracks his curated reality wide open. A misplaced photograph. A buried memory. A lethal anomaly. What begins as a minor discrepancy unravels a terrifying truth: Adrian's entire life hasn't been his own. It has been orchestrated.
The Trust is real. And it is everywhere.
The Architecture
They don't react to the world.
They dictate it.
Operating in plain sight for decades, the Trust is governed by a ruthless echelon of old-money power spanning from the boardrooms of London to the execution engines of Dubai — deciding which companies rise, which leaders fall, and which lives are allowed to continue. Now Adrian has been summoned to Lake Como. He is no longer observing the game. He is being evaluated.
"The Trust doesn't fear disruption. It absorbs it."
Read the Opening
A man died in this room six hours ago.
Step inside the Prologue. A cleaned apartment in Mayfair, an investigator who reads rooms the way others read faces, and four words that begin everything.
Read the Prologue ›In Its Own Words
The voice of the Trust.
"House of Vale is not a man. It is a name."
From the novel"This death was introduced."
Prologue"The Trust doesn't fear disruption. It absorbs it."
From the novelFor Readers Of
A prestige thriller in the tradition of
The tension comes from invisible hierarchy and the seductive coherence of the wrong logic — not from the chase.
The Series
Five books. One architecture.
Placed side by side, the five covers read as a single sentence. Book One begins it.
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About the Author
Patrick Perrine
Patrick Perrine is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author known for building and scaling ventures across multiple industries. His work explores the intersection of systems, human behavior, and institutional power. Drawing on real-world boardroom experience, his writing blends deep psychological suspense with high-stakes global intrigue — stories that feel both elevated and unsettlingly plausible.
House of Vale: The Selection is his debut thriller — a story of power, influence, and the systems operating just beneath the surface of modern society.
Pre-Order
House of Vale: The Selection
Power isn't given. It's selected.
Ships September 2026 · Signed copies available
Prologue
The body had already been removed by the time Sloane Mercer reached the twelfth floor.
She knew before the elevator doors opened. The hallway had the wrong silence — not the silence of an empty corridor, but the silence of one that had been recently full and was now being kept that way. There were two men in dark coats standing at the entrance to the apartment, and neither of them looked at her face as she approached. They simply stepped aside.
That was the first wrong thing.
The second was the smell. Mayfair apartments at this price point smelled of nothing — that was what you paid for. This one smelled of cleaning solvent. Recent. The kind a building's service team used in the half hour between a problem ending and the building deciding the problem had never existed.
The apartment was beautiful in the way Mayfair apartments were always beautiful — high coffered ceilings, wide oak floors bleached to a bone-pale gray, floor-to-ceiling windows holding a careful slice of the Thames. Nothing on the surfaces. Nothing out of alignment. The kitchen, just visible through the open archway, looked the way a kitchen looks when no one has ever actually used it.
She stood in the threshold and let the room finish settling. There was a near-invisible compression in the rug fibers next to the sofa — the weight had been there long enough to leave a mark. A single side table sat a degree off from the line of the sofa, which meant someone had brushed against it recently and corrected it imperfectly. The marble counter had been wiped, but not in the pattern of a regular cleaning; it had been wiped the way you wipe a counter when you want one specific area cleaner than the rest.
A man had died in this room within the last six hours. He had died near the sofa. He had died without struggling. And then a very disciplined set of people had spent ninety minutes turning the room back into a brochure.
She reached into the inside pocket of her coat for the small lead pencil she had carried since her grandfather taught her, forty years ago, to make notes in something that could be erased. She flipped open the legal pad in her left hand.
At the top of a fresh page, she wrote four words in clean, ungenerous block letters.
This death was introduced.
She underlined the word introduced.
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The Selection releases September 2026.