Steven Axelrod: 7 books

During a long winter and short, chilly spring, a series of disturbing incidents rock the small resort island of Nantucket. A Land Bank executive dies in a suspicious hunting accident, a prominent local family's historic summer cottage burns down in an arson fire, and a teenage girl lies comatose from...

It's Christmas Eve on Nantucket and prominent businessman Jackson Blum is about to live out his own version of A Christmas Carol. No visions, no ghosts, just the past, represented by the exhumed skeleton of his old partner Ted Coddington with a bullet from Blum's Ruger pistol in its skull; the present,...

Henry Kennis, Nantucket island's poetry-writing police chief who will remind readers of Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone and Spenser, works a second challenging case in Nantucket Five-spot. At the height of the summer tourist season, a threat to bomb the annual Boston Pops Concert could destroy the...

In celebration of our 20th anniversary, Poisoned Pen Press has commissioned original short stories from thirty-five of its authors, past and present. Some names will be immediately recognizable to mystery aficionados--Kerry Greenwood with her Phryne Fisher mysteries, now also a popular television...

When Nantucket homeowner Preston Lomax is killed in his McMansion, everyone on the island could be a suspect. Lomax lived large, owed money, and the word was spreading he was planning to stiff them all and disappear. Chief of Police Henry Kennis, a newcomer from California, finds himself investigating...

The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket's community theater. Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the...

Following Gertrude Stein’s efforts throughout her life to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, the essays in Primary Stein return the lens to her primary texts, including novels, plays, lectures, poetry, and more. Much textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether...