The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

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The Poisoned Pen Bookstore We're an independent bookstore which specializes in signed 1st editions and book signings. You can also download the monthly Newsletter or read it online.

We are also the hub for autographed books by Diana Gabaldon, Clive Cussler, Preston & Child and more... *For the most prompt reply please email [email protected] regarding inquiries into orders already placed. The Poisoned Pen carries modern fiction titles, with a specialty in signed, first editions. With 200+ onsite author interviews each year, this is a great place to meet authors and buy signed books. Visit www.poisonedpen.com to subscribe to our eNews in which you'll be the first to find out about incoming titles, what's going on in the book world as well as special event information.

10/18/2026

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Hosted by Karen Odden


Tim Schooley. Circus of the Vanishing Elephant (HTF, 19.95).

"A humorous, heartfelt historical novel that captures the gritty, absurd, and tight-knit world of the 1970s circus." - Brendan McKelvy, Foreword Reviews

How do you make an elephant disappear?

In 1974, the King Minos Circus is struggling to survive-until Christos "King" Minos unveils a dazzling new illusion: a vanishing elephant act starring Henrietta, the animal he loves more fiercely than he can admit.

But when Henrietta disappears during a parade, the trick becomes something far more dangerous.

Suspicion falls on Minos's estranged daughter, Randi-an activist who has vowed to free the circus elephants-and on Ainge, the circus's newest clown, a young man still haunted by his father's rejection after learning he is gay. Minos feels betrayed by both and vows to recover Henrietta and bring those responsible to justice.

But are Randi and Ainge the villains Minos imagines? Their journey across the American West-through small towns, roadside shows, and shifting loyalties-forces them all to confront hard questions about family, freedom, and who truly belongs to whom.

Because in the end, the fate of Henrietta may not belong to the circus at all.

Tim Schooley is the author of historical fiction and legal thrillers. His novel The Wool Translator won the Jameson Award (UOP) and was short-listed for the Chaucer Book Award (Chanticleer Reviews). Tim pursued a career as an appellate attorney and law school professor, and early in his life he performed as a circus clown with Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus.

10/16/2026

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Robert B. McCaw. Traitors (Norton, $29.99 Unsigned).

Robert Cooper—deputy assistant attorney general for counterintelligence in the DOJ’s National Security Division—has built a storied career distinguished by high-profile arrests and prosecutions of enemy spies. One morning, he’s approached by a Russian sleeper agent looking to defect. The agent offers Cooper alarming information: Russian operatives have infiltrated the US government at its highest levels, including a mole in the senior ranks of the FBI. Cooper’s investigations lead to the discovery of a clandestine Russian plot involving deep-cover agents in senior government positions. As Cooper and his team at the DOJ race to uncover the Kremlin’s plans and unmask the traitors, a coup in Russia brings to power a militant extremist regime seemingly intent on sidelining the US on the world stage while Russia retakes its former Soviet territories. In Robert B. McCaw’s fast-paced novel, high-stakes political intrigue mixes with riveting moments of international espionage.

Robert B. McCaw, a graduate of Georgetown University, served as a lieutenant in the US Army and earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. He was a partner in a major international law firm based in Washington, DC, and New York City. He’s also the author of the Koa Kane Hawaiian mystery series. He lives with his wife in New York and La Jolla, San Diego.


David McCloskey. London Station (Norton, $29.99 Signed copies).

A new US administration has taken office, installing a brash and unconventional CIA director skeptical of old alliances and determined to disrupt the Agency. When the axe falls on the chief of London Station, the agency veteran decides to spy for the Brits—a betrayal uncovered by his replacement, Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Caught between a turncoat spymaster and a ruthless new boss back at Langley, Procter must now navigate a tense environment as old friends become adversaries and no one knows whom to trust.
Adding to the chaos is a new breed of private intelligence agency: a secretive and powerful company run by a reclusive billionaire with a very different agenda than the two old allies who are suddenly at each other’s throats.

When assets begin dying, Procter and her team in London Station must find out who is leaking the sources’ identities—and why—before both agencies go blind. Soon they will have to decide whether loyalty to the Mission means disobeying the Agency they serve. Immersing readers in the technological revolution upending intelligence tradecraft, London Station explores the changing nature of the spy business and what happens when politics threaten to destroy the special relationship between America and Britain.

David McCloskey is the author of five books, including The Seventh Floor and The Persian. He is also cohost of the podcast The Rest Is Classified. A former CIA analyst, he worked at Langley and in field stations across the Middle East.

10/16/2026

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Elizabeth Hand. Unspeakable Things (Little Brown, $30.00).

A chance meeting on a windswept English moor sparks an obsessive—and soon deadly—love affair between two lonely young women in this clever inversion of the Gothic classics, with a fresh spin that could only come from the award-winning author of A Haunting on the Hill.

It's the 1920s and the English countryside is quiet—which suits Olivia and Tamsin, two young women happy to be overlooked by society. Their relationship is complicated: unruly, working-class Tamsin was brought to Kerrith Manor to be tutored at Olivia's side, but the two quickly have found something more than friendship—a bone-deep recognition that ignites an endless passion.

But an unexpected visitor and an unexplained death disrupt their idyll, sending both women on the run. They find harbor at Ledges, the dazzling estate of ruthlessly wealthy and mysterious Rex de Voil—and a favorite hang-out for the bohemian “bright young things” eager to cut loose far from London’s prying eyes. Olivia and Tamsin revel in their newfound freedom…until they learn that nothing in Rex’s world is without cost.

Richly evoking a vibrant time in q***r history, Unspeakable Things is a seductive historical thriller that explores the haunting bond between two women coming into their power even as it unspools their obsession to its deadly end.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of A Haunting on the Hill, the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar, as well as Hokuloa Road, named a Notable Book of 2022 by the New York Times, and more than nineteen cross-genre novels and collections of short fiction. Her work has received the Shirley Jackson Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award (four times), the Nebula Award (twice), as well as the James M. Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards, and she’s written for publications including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Boston Review, and more. She divides her time between Maine and London.

10/15/2026

***Please note: This event has changed. Tasha Alexander will no longer be able to attend. Andrew Child will be the only author speaking tonight. Thank you.

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Lee Child and Andrew Child. Chain Reaction (Bantam, $34.00).
The heart-pounding new Jack Reacher thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child.

Jack Reacher is hard to find. It's not easy to track him down. And he likes it that way. But General Susan Turner, based deep inside the Pentagon, has the means and the motive. She needs his help. A member of her team has been brutally murdered on covert duty. She can’t trust anyone she works with, not even her deputy. She needs someone from the outside. Someone who solves problems and disappears without a trace.

Reacher heads to Summertown, Colorado. A town as remote and bizarre as it gets. One diner, one motel, five massive data centers, two giant solar farms humming away in the dust. Total population: four people. And one of them is watching him. But Reacher isn’t built to run. He’s built to finish things. General Turner knows that if they come for Reacher, they’ll regret it—all the way to the top of the chain.


Lee Child is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher series and the complete Jack Reacher story collection, No Middle Name. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in one hundred territories. A native of England and a former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City and Wyoming.

Andrew Child, who also writes as Andrew Grant, is the author of RUN, False Positive, False Friend, False Witness, Invisible, and Too Close to Home. Child and his wife, the novelist Tasha Alexander, live on a wildlife preserve in Wyoming. He is the #1 bestselling co-author of the Jack Reacher novels The Sentinel, Better Off Dead, No Plan B, The Secret, and In Too Deep.

10/14/2026

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Nicholas Russell. Observer (Harper, $28.00).

A disquieting, atmospheric debut horror novel about a young woman investigating her mother’s disappearance at an abandoned Nevada observatory, for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and Mariana Enriquez

On a scorched summer day, Renata Scarborough comes home to find the contents of her estranged mother Corinne’s life on her doorstep. Her aunt and cousin seem eager to conclude that the troublesome Corinne is dead. Renata isn’t convinced and begins poring over her mother’s journals for answers. Among descriptions of Corinne’s work at the McNairy Observatory, Renata unearths a hidden obsession with an early twentieth-century surveyor whose encounters with a mysterious entity bear a startling resemblance to her mother’s reports. Compelled beyond reason, Renata journeys to that now-abandoned outpost in the Nevada wilderness to search for the truth.

But in McNairy, a thorny, decades-long clash between science and the desert only complicates Renata’s questions. The town’s scarred and suspicious residents refuse to discuss the observatory’s closure, leaving Renata to wonder if Corinne’s version of events reflects reality. As she ascends the peak that looms over McNairy, Renata witnesses unnerving phenomena she can’t explain and feels a creeping dread that what is waiting for her isn’t her mother at all.

Haunting, darkly comic, and captivating, Observer reveals the pure cosmic terror of the desert, a place of wonder and menace, asking what happens when we look out at nature and find something inhuman looking back.

Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, No Tokens, Defector, and Hunger Mountain. Observer is his first novel.

10/14/2026

Jason Stone. The Beauty of the Days Gone By (Grove/Atlantic, $28.00).

"I loved the story and the way it was told . . . Such an artful narrative, like a more lyrical Lonesome Dove—dark, but also hopeful.”—Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down

Inspired by real events, a vivid and sweeping Western in the grand tradition of Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian: a saga of fathers and sons, captivity and belonging, and the violent struggle between Texans, Comanche, and Kiowa in the years after the Civil War

1866. On a sun-drenched stretch of West Texas prairie, the Terry brothers are playing near their family ranch when a Kiowa war party suddenly descends. Former Texas Ranger RL Terry returns to total devastation: his home in flames, his wife Sally mortally wounded, and his two boys carried off into captivity.

With the help of his close friend, the great cattleman Charles Goodnight, Terry begins a relentless search for his missing sons. He rides across the vast Southern plains and into the heartland of the Comanche Empire, where buffalo hunters massacre the great herds that once blackened the horizon and soldiers under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie wage brutal campaigns to exterminate the tribes. Meanwhile, Terry's eldest, Sam, realizes that if he is to survive his captivity, he must abandon his old life for a new one. Under the tutelage of the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker, he takes a new name and slowly learns the ways of a proud, embattled people.

Years pass. Track is laid, fences go up, and reservation lines redraw the map of the West. Sam forgets the world of his childhood, and father and son find themselves on opposite sides of an existential conflict. Their paths are destined to cross at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, where the captured horse herds are slaughtered by the thousands and the fate of the Comanche nation hangs in the balance.

The story unfolds across two eras: the brutal post–Civil War frontier and the 1920s, where an aging Charles Goodnight is cared for by a devoted young woman and a historian determined to record his memories. As they draw out his stories of blazing the Goodnight-Loving Trail and settling the land once known as Comancheria, the old plainsman reflects on the clash of cultures that defined the American West—and must at last confront the full truth of what passed between him and his old friend RL Terry.

Jason Stone grew up in West Texas and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in San Antonio. The Beauty of the Days Gone By is his debut novel.

10/13/2026

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Joe R Lansdale. Petrified Dreams (Little Brown, $30.00).

With women going missing across the Deep South, dynamic detective duo Hap and Leonard zero in on a horrific, chimerical villain protected and abetted by Texas’ most powerful.

The sun never sets on justice, but it may finally be setting on the beloved crime fighting duo of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The two opposites—brothers from another mother—have called the detecting business quits, but when a prop plane holding the bodies of several kidnapped women crashes into their favorite watering hole, the boys know they’re in for one last effort. With the help of a victim’s sister, they learn that a network of men has stolen vulnerable young women on behalf of a horrifying, charismatic villain known as The Artist, a sculptor of living things, including his own body, and protected by the elite of the South. But the Artist refuses to be found, and every lead brings Hap and Leonard into the crosshairs of something even more dangerous. Finding The Artist is a long shot, and getting out alive is even less likely.

Perhaps the darkest, funniest, and most intense of the Hap & Leonard mysteries, Petrified Dreams concludes the revered series as audaciously as one would expect from the mojo master of Southern crime and wit.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of nearly four dozen novels, including Rusty Puppy, the Edgar-award winning The Bottoms, Sunset and Sawdust, and Leather Maiden. He has received nine Bram Stoker Awards, the American Mystery Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.



Kasey Lansdale. First Chance (Blackstone, $29.99).

First Chance is a suspenseful thriller that readers won’t be able to put down—perfect for fans of Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly.

Chance Kirby isn’t new to detective work, but starting over in Hopeful, Texas, is a big step. Determined to leave behind her father and stepmother’s shadow and carve out a future of her own, she opens a small PI agency, expecting missing heirlooms and marital disputes. But when the cold case of a murdered teenage girl is dropped on her doorstep, Chance finds herself in the middle of an investigation with no leads.

With her adopted sister Tia, her loyal dog Sissy, and the town’s newly arrived police chief Isabella Lopez at her side, Chance soon begins to suspect this murder may be only one piece of a much bigger, and more disturbing, pattern.

To stop a predator who, it seems, has managed to evade authorities for decades, Chance must stay one step ahead … or risk becoming the next target.

Kasey Lansdale has been in the fiction world since birth as a writer, editor, audiobook narrator, and creative professional. Lansdale is based in LA and currently serves as head editor at Pandi Press. She has released numerous short stories and anthologies from publications such as Harper Collins, Titan Books, and more, and her fiction has been adapted for television and comics. First Chance is her debut novel.

10/12/2026

A talk to remember Jeffrey Archer and discussion on his final novel, Adam and Eve. Signed bookplates available with purchase.

Order here: https://store.poisonedpen.com/item/2gXGWU9f3YVHcvYeNzucww


Jeffrey Archer. Adam and Eve (Harper Collins, $30.00).

You will get with our copies: NEW: A letter written just to Poisoned Pen customers hand signed by Jeffrey, a signed bookplate, and also a page from the manuscript with signature. All orders will also be put into a drawing to receive a Parker fountain pen and a deluxe chess set relevant to the story (the winner of this Grand Prize must be US-based due to shipping issues).

We ship worldwide so international customers will receive everything but eligibility for the Grand Prize.

THE FINAL NOVEL FROM THE MASTER STORYTELLER

Armistice Day 1918. Two children are born on the same day, hours - but worlds - apart.

One the son of a shepherd, the other the daughter of an Earl.

Adam and Eve.

Their births mark the end of one war. Their love will change the outcome of another.

'If there were a Nobel Prize for storytelling, Archer would win'Daily Telegraph

'Archer is a master entertainer'Time

'Probably the greatest storyteller of our age'Mail on Sunday

'Peerless master of the page turner'Daily Mail

Jeffrey Archer, whose novels include the Clifton Chronicles, the William Warwick novels and Kane and Abel, has topped bestseller lists around the world, with sales of over 300 million copies. He was the only author ever to have been a #1 bestseller in fiction, short stories and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). A member of the House of Lords for over a quarter of a century, the author was married to Dame Mary Archer, and they have two sons, two granddaughters and three grandsons.

10/11/2026

join us in-store & on Facebook live!

Hosted by Abigail Johnson

Dusti Bowling. The Drowning Game (Union Square, $12.99).

Award-winning author Dusti Bowling masterfully crafts a wild ride on Arizona’s Salt River in this Hitchcockian thriller that’s perfect for fans of Holly Jackson and Karen M. McManus.

It’s the late 1990s, and seventeen-year-old Christian is content with his summer plans to work and hang out with his cat, when he gets a phone call from his best friend that will change his life forever. James invites Christian to Arizona for a whitewater rafting trip, even though he knows Christian is terrified of water. But James is persuasive, and Christian relents.

In Salt River Canyon, the heat is scorching, and so is James’s pretty girlfriend, Freya. However, something seems off between the couple as bitter words fly. When James and the others disappear in the second raft, Christian and Freya are left to face the rapids alone. Disaster strikes when Freya falls into the river, and Christian is frozen with fear.

One year later, Christian is still wracked with guilt over Freya’s death. Now, he’s a freshman at Arizona State University, and he thinks he sees Freya on campus. It can’t be her. Freya is dead, after all. They found her body. Didn’t they? Christian follows Madison, the girl who looks like Freya, everywhere. He was certain Freya had died that day, but now he’s certain Madison is Freya. Will he ever find out what’s real? Or will his obsession be his downfall?

Dusti Bowling is the award-winning, bestselling author of Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus, Momentous Events in the Life of a Cactus, The Beat I Drum, 24 Hours in Nowhere, The Canyon's Edge, Across the Desert, Dust, and the Aven Green chapter book series.

Dusti's books have won the Reading the West Award, the Sakura Medal, a Golden Kite Honor, the William Allen White Children's Book Award, and have been nominated for over fifty state awards. Her books are Junior Library Guild Selections and have been named best books of the year by the Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, Bank Street College of Education, A Mighty Girl, Shelf Awareness, and many more.

Dusti currently lives in Eagar, Arizona with her husband, three daughters, and a bunch of farm animals.

Abigail Johnson was born in Pennsylvania. When she was twelve, her family traded in snowstorms for year-round summers and moved to Arizona. Abigail chronicled the entire road trip and has been writing ever since. She became a tetraplegic when she was seventeen, but hasn''t let that stop her from bodysurfing in Mexico, writing and directing a high-school production of Cinderella, and becoming a published author. Visit Abigail at abigailjohnsonbooks.com and on Twitter . Abigail Johnson resides in Arizona.

10/08/2026

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Brian Freeman. Where the Road Ends (Blackstone, $29.99).

The murder of a judge and his wife turns Jonathan Stride’s world upside down and leaves him facing a shocking crossroad in this electrifying mystery from New York Times bestselling author Brian Freeman

Jonathan Stride’s partner, Maggie Bei, is driving home after midnight when a call comes in: shots fired at the home of a Duluth judge.

Moments later, she finds Gordon and Tracy Hartwick murdered in their bed. But someone is hiding in the judge’s house, and as Maggie lays chase, she’s forced to make a split-second decision that leaves the intruder dead.

When Stride arrives at the scene, he has to give Maggie devastating news. The intruder had no gun. He wasn’t the killer. She shot an innocent man.

With Maggie facing a firestorm over her actions, Stride must discover who really killed Gordon and Tracy Hartwick—and what secrets they were hiding that put them in the gunsights of a murderer. The shattering finale will change Stride’s world in ways he can’t imagine and leave everyone he loves asking the same question: When you reach the end of the road, where do you go from there?

Brian Freeman is a New York Times bestselling author of psychological suspense novels including Spilled Blood, winner of the ITW Thriller Award for best novel.

Address

4014 N Goldwater Boulevard, Ste 101
Scottsdale, AZ
85251

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 10am - 6pm
Sunday 12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+18885609919

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