After an hour mucking around trying to figure out why my new MMA8451Q accelerometer breakout board was returning odd values I stumbled across this post which lead to this post. Then I went back to the device data sheet and found the key paragraph I had missed

A LOW to HIGH transition on the SDA line while the SCL line is high is defined as a stop condition (STOP). A data transfer is always terminated by a STOP. A Master may also issue a repeated START during a data transfer. The MMA8451Q expects repeated STARTs to be used to randomly read from specific registers.

After implementing the approach suggested in this post I can now reliably read registers on the device.

This appears to be applicable for the MMA8451Q, MMA8452Q and MMA8453Q devices.