Stone Cold Dead

by Stephen Lewis

Attorney Dave Abrams, haunted by his failure to protect a woman from her abusive husband, seeks to clear his head by traveling with his wife Kelly from Brooklyn to their new summer home in northern Michigan. Kelly carries with her the anxiety of having left her teenaged daughter with her ex-husband, Michael, fresh out of prison and showing signs of something dark emerging in his personality. Once in Michigan, Dave finds himself defending Frankie Asebou an Ojibwe woman who has confessed to killing her husband while Kelly learns that her daughter has fled Brooklyn with a friend and is driving to Michigan. While Dave works to find facts to support his conviction that Frankie is innocent, Kelly flies back to Brooklyn to pick up Allie's trail only to learn that Michael is also tracking their daughter. Meanwhile, aided by Livonia Walkingstick, an Ojibwe storyteller, and Kelly's Uncle John, a retired cop from Chicago, Dave pursues his case. The two plots converge in Michigan leading to an explosive and startling conclusion that leaves readers as breathless as the characters.

252 pages, Hardcover

First published July 25, 2007

About the author

Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Stephen Lewis holds a doctorate in American Literature from New York University, and he is Professor of English Emeritus at Suffolk Community College, on Long Island, New York. He now lives with his wife and daughter on five acres in a restored farmhouse on Old Mission Peninsula in northern lower Michigan.

Throughout his career, he has been both a writer and a teacher of writing. As a teacher, he has worked with college level and adult learner students in a variety of settings from standard classrooms, to online, to one on one tutorials, to small group workshops. In all of these environments, he has had success encouraging student writers to improve their skills. In a number of instances, these successes have led directly to publication.

His writing career began with a college textbook publication in 1970, followed by four more texts over the next twenty years. During this period, he also published short stories, poetry, and articles. His first novel, The Monkey Rope was published in 1990 followed by And Baby Makes None (1991) two mysteries set in Brooklyn and published by Walker & Company. He turned his attention to a different time and place, New England in the seventeenth century, for Mysteries of Colonial Times, written for Berkley, and drawing upon his expertise as a scholar of New England Puritanism. The Dumb Shall Sing, the first of this series was published August, 1999, followed by The Blind in Darkness in May, 2000, and The Sea Hath Spoken January, 2001. His historical novel, Murder On Old Mission, put out in 2005 by Arbutus Press, was a finalist in the historical fiction category of ForeWord Magazine’s book of the year awards. His most recent novel, Stone Cold Dead, was submitted by Arbutus to the 2007 Edgars.

He continues working in various genres, having recently published "The Visitor" in Chariton Review,“ and had "Eagles Rising" accepted by Palo Alto Review.