Crime Novels by Stephen J Grant
Mortified - #1 in the Series The Melvin Peters Mysteries
When recently widowed undertaker Melvin Peters, a pillar of his community, finds a man murdered in his own basement mortuary, he can’t help taking it personally: the victim is an old enemy, and the mortuary is where he feels safe. Worse, the victim was supposed to be dead already, the clue being he was in a mortuary fridge.
DI Janice Evans, the case detective and Melvin’s teenage crush, seals off his workplace as a crime scene, threatening his already flat-lining business with bankruptcy. With two young children and a mortgage unimpressed by grief, Melvin thinks he has a choice: watch his business collapse or take matters into his own hands. He starts digging into the victim’s associates, including a bully-turned-businessman with political ambitions and a long-term employee with a grudge. When he makes a crucial breakthrough, his elation soon turns to despair as he then commits the most mortifying mistake of his life, putting his family squarely in the path of someone who doesn’t mind making problems disappear permanently.
Mortified was completed in Dec 2025. I am currently looking to get it traditionally published, but should that not work out, I will publish it myself at some point in 2026.
If anyone would like an advance copy for review purposes, please contact me via info@stevegrantauthor.com.
Petrified - #2 in the Series The Melvin Peters Mysteries
The perfect high. What could go wrong?
There’s a new class of substance coming onto the streets that offers the possibility of the ultimate high with none of the usual risks.
Melvin Peters arranges to meet his friend Angus Tuloch after work. That Angus doesn’t show seems like no big deal. But when Angus fails to come home or show up for work the next day, alarm bells sound. Then Angus shows up dead in Mel’s back yard. What’s worse - he appears to have been embalmed alive and the evidence points at Mel. But then a huge level of the novel drug is detected in Angus’s blood, and Mel is drawn into a shady world of drugs and criminality that he will struggle to escape from.
Petrified will be published in 2027.