Kurt B. Dowdle is at the Moravian Book Shop, 428 Main St, Bethlehem, at 1 p.m. April 19 for a book signing of his "Ax & Spade" novel, which is based on a factual story dating to the 19th century.

Dowdle's inspiration for writing this story came to him when he found an article in The New York Times about a double axe killing of a wife and husband and the hanging of the suspected murderer in December 1880.

The house where the alleged murders took place was about one mile from where Dowdle grew up in Bethlehem.

Dowdle remembered a girl in elementary school bringing up the story. She lived in the house where the alleged murders were believed to have taken place. Since he was young at the time, he didn't look into it any further.

When the story landed in his lap many years later via the archives of The New York Times, Dowdle decided to look deeper into the story. It became a personal quest because the house was right down the street, along the Monocacy Creek, where he had played as a child.

The details behind the gruesome tale are conflicting. However, the basic story about the alleged double axe murder remained the same.

Apparently, there was never a formal investigation, allegedly because many townspeople would be implicated. The man who captured the alleged murderer had found him in a barn.

He took the alleged perpetrator back to the house where the couple was found dead. Some wanted to have a jury trial right there and then with the dead bodies still in the home. Supposedly, the alleged killer was killed by townspeople before a trial was held.

The protagonist in Dowdle's story is Detective Kamp. Most times, authors put a bit of their own personalities into their characters.

Says Dowdle in a phone interview, "I definitely tried to put myself in the mindset of the trained detective in the actual story. How would he have gone about figuring it out?"

Dowdle finds himself obsessed with trying to figure things out and trying to understand life in general.

The impulses that Detective Kamp has in his story are similar to those that Dowdle had when trying to put the pieces of the story together.

"I want this to be the story that people don't want to put down.

"I'm just trying to get people thinking about what that world was actually like, the history we are told as opposed to the history that's there but essentially a secret history.

"I am not a tin-foil conspiracy theorist, but am totally fascinated with things you can look up and look into and get to the bottom of by coming up with your own understanding and conclusion on what the truth is."

Dowdle already has a sequel to "Ax & Spade" in the works: "Trumpet Of The Dead."