Mystery on the Isles of Shoals

The cold-blooded ax murders of two innocent Norwegian immigrant women in a botched burglary of their island home off the coast of New Hampshire has retained a grip on the region, beguiling tourists, conspiracy theorists and tale-spinners right up to the present day.

The killer, a half-crazed Prussian immigrant down on his luck, was quickly rounded up and eventually hanged for his crime. But he never confessed and, while imprisoned, gained a circle of admirers and deniers that still casts a shadow of a doubt today.

Yet a definitive account of the Smuttynose Island ax murders has never been written—until now. Dennis Robinson, the premier historian of the region, has created a story with numerous alluring components—a stark, New England noir setting, a hideous crime, and a sequence of events that cast a light on a nation in transition from rugged and lawless to civilized and respectable (or at least attempting to be).

Robinson goes beyond the headlines of the burgeoning yellow press to explore the deeper lessons about American culture, crime, and adulation as the Smuttynose murders were sensationalized by the Boston literati who'd newly arrived at the Isles seeking rest and recreation. In this early instance of gentrification, the old Island population of hard-scrabble fishermen were driven from the islands, never to return.