Narrator

Steve Hendrickson

Steve Hendrickson
  • “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.”
    —Jerome K. Jerome

    With the unforgettable opening words “Marley was dead, to begin with…” Charles Dickens kindled not just the modern celebration of the Yuletide but also rekindled the tradition of gathering ‘round the fire on Christmas Eve to tell ghost stories. Here are a few of my favorites—some light, some somber, some extra-scary, beginning with a solo adaptation of A Christmas Carol. At age eleven I was introduced to Ebeneezer Scrooge and theatre-going in one magical night, when a production of the Dickens classic at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis positively floored me. I’ve never spent another Christmastide without reading, watching, and/or appearing in this marvelous story. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I had reading these wondrous tales!

  • As the city of Minneapolis prepares for a visit from President William McKinley, someone else prepares for murder. On the day before the visit, a union activist is found hanged, naked, outside a ruined mansion. A placard around his neck reads “THE SECRET ALLIANCE HAS SPOKEN.” Who is the alliance? What does it want? How was the victim involved with the city’s corrupt mayor? And why did he possess a photograph of a prominent citizen in a compromising position? Shadwell Rafferty searches for answers, encountering bribery, corruption, union organizers, anarchists, and conspiracy, putting himself in danger. But as luck would have it, his old friends Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson are on their way.

    In this fourth installment of Larry Millett’s Minnesota Mystery series, Shadwell Rafferty commands center stage in a brand-new city. Packed with Millett’s signature historical and architectural detail, this book is deviously delightful.

  • Decades before Field of Dreams there was The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the classic baseball fable that became the hit movie and musical Damn Yankees. Now a new generation is ready to discover this delightful book, restored to its original title.

    Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate’s satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21 before the deal becomes final―and eternal. With the luscious temptress Lola to distract him, he’ll have a hell of a time wriggling out of the bargain.

  • Dogged by depression, doubt, and—as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed—emphysema, sixty-six-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer he’d nearly captured in Munich in 1892. The murderer, known as the Monster of Munich, announces that he has relocated to Eisendorf, a tiny village near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

    If Holmes is not what he once was, the same can be said for Eisendorf: once a thriving community founded by German idealists but now a dying town with only forty residents—two of whom have, indeed, died recently under highly mysterious circumstances. Replete with all the gothic richness of Larry Millett’s earlier Holmes novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma links events in 1892 Germany with those in small-town Minnesota in 1920 in a double mystery that tests the aging detective’s mettle—and the listener’s nerve—as never before.

    Guided by Eisendorf’s peculiar archivist and taunted by the Monster, Holmes finds himself drawn into the town’s dark history of violence and secrecy, and into the strange tunnels that underscore the old flour mill where answers, and grievous danger, lie in wait. No longer the cool, flawless logician of times past, Holmes must nonetheless match wits with a fiendish opponent who taunts him right up to a final, explosive confrontation.

  • Sherlock Holmes is bored between cases at 221B Baker Street. So when King Oskar II of Sweden—who has heard of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone by a farmer in Minnesota—asks to engage his services, Holmes jumps at the chance to decipher the runes and determine whether the find is real or a hoax. With Dr. John H. Watson by his side, faithfully recording every detail, Holmes makes his way to Minnesota for a third time. But, in the first of many strange and unfortunate coincidences, the farmer who found the mysterious stone is murdered, and the stone itself is stolen on the day the famous detective arrives.

    With the help of one Shadwell Rafferty, now a friend and partner, Holmes must solve this baffling case to find both the stone and the murderer.

  • When one of Minnesota’s wealthiest scions goes missing, it’s up to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to track a cold-blooded killer.

    The year is 1896, and the magnificent winter carnival is under way in St. Paul, Minnesota, when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city’s most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man has disappeared on the eve of his wedding—and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival’s ice palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case.

    His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society and into cahoots with Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloon owner and part-time private investigator. Soon Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty are embroiled in a perilous adventure that takes them from one frozen corner of the city to another and out onto the treacherous ice of the Mississippi River as they trail a cruel and ruthless killer.

  • In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, MD. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist—known only as the Red Demon—who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

    Set against the backdrop of the real, devastating Hinckley forest fire of 1894, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon is the tense and atmospheric first novel in Larry Millett’s classic series of adventures that brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Minnesota.