Jane Kelly Books in Order

If you want Meg from the beginning: Killing Time in Ocean City → Cape Mayhem → Wrong Beach Island
If you like cold cases and boardwalk history: Missing You in Atlantic City → Greetings from Ventnor City → Strangers in the Avalon Dunes
If you want a shorter side adventure: A Fear of Seaside Heights
If you want a Philadelphia-set historical mystery: Widow Lady

Jane Kelly grew up in Philadelphia, and that sense of place runs all through her fiction. She attended Mount Saint Joseph Academy, studied at Chestnut Hill College, later earned an MS in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, and added an MPhil in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin.

Before her books found readers, she had a long working life outside publishing.

Kelly worked in online information, consulting, and facilities management, and her career took her to cities including New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Phoenix. Even so, one place kept calling her back. She had been visiting the Jersey Shore since she was five months old, and she kept returning year after year.

Writing came later than it does for some novelists, but once it arrived, it stuck. In the mid-1990s she wrote a novel after deciding that turning an annoying real-life figure into a fictional victim was a safer outlet than staying mad. That first book never found a publisher, but it taught her something important. She liked writing, and she wanted to keep at it.

Then she found the right setting.

After being encouraged to write about what she knew best, Kelly turned to the South Jersey shore towns she had known all her life. That decision gave her Meg Daniels, a funny, stubborn amateur sleuth who keeps trying to relax and keeps running into crimes instead. The series begins with Killing Time in Ocean City and moves through Cape Mayhem, Wrong Beach Island, Missing You in Atlantic City, Greetings from Ventnor City, and Strangers in the Avalon Dunes. Readers who enjoy regional mysteries tend to like the books for their real-feeling shore settings, quick pace, and Meg's running commentary on the absurd people around her.

Kelly has also written beyond Meg's main run. A Fear of Seaside Heights is a side adventure that sends Meg undercover on the boardwalk, while Widow Lady opens a very different mystery line in 1960 Philadelphia. That range says a lot about what interests Kelly as a writer. She likes places with strong local character, ordinary people under pressure, and mysteries that grow out of old hurts, family secrets, and social expectations.

Her books may be light on their feet, but they are not empty. Meg jokes, worries, gets things wrong, and keeps going anyway, which gives the series a grounded feel. The stakes are often personal. A missing mother, a runaway sister, a vanished grandfather, or a bad death in the wrong place can send the whole story spinning. That mix of humor and sadness is part of what makes the books memorable.

The work has earned notice too. Missing You in Atlantic City won an Independent Publisher Book Award silver medal for Mid-Atlantic fiction, and Strangers in the Avalon Dunes later did the same. Alongside her fiction, Kelly has stayed active in the mystery community, serving as a past president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime and on the board of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

She now lives in the Philadelphia area, close to both her city setting and the shore towns that shaped the Meg Daniels books. It fits her work nicely. Jane Kelly writes like someone who knows that a rented beach house, a quiet block in the city, or the neighbor across the street can hide a lot more than first appears.