Jess Montgomery Books in Order

Jess Montgomery is the pen name Sharon Short uses for her Kinship historical mysteries. She is an Ohio writer who has spent most of her life in the state, studied English at Wright State University, and later earned a master's degree in technical communication from Bowling Green State University. Long before the Kinship books, she was already building a life around words, books, and the people who love them.

She started early.

At six, she made a tiny book called The Fireman, wrapped it in red construction paper, priced it at one cent, and sold it to an aunt. She has said that reading was a refuge during a chaotic childhood, and that making up stories came just as naturally. Years later, after her first novel was published, that homemade booklet found its way back to her. It is a small story, but it tells you a lot.

Her path into publishing was steady rather than sudden. She read widely, leaned hard on craft books and Writer's Digest, and sharpened her skills at Antioch Writers' Workshop in 1990 and a Mystery Writers of America workshop the following year. She has said that she took only one creative writing course in school, so a lot of her education came from teaching herself, reading closely, and revising until the work did what she wanted it to do.

Along the way she worked a range of jobs, including retail clerk, technical writer, marketing communicator, freelance newspaper columnist, and adjunct instructor. Later, in a nice full-circle turn, she directed Antioch Writers' Workshop and became a contributing editor for Writer's Digest. She also wrote the Literary Life column for the Dayton Daily News, which fits her long-running role as both working writer and literary citizen.

The Jess Montgomery books grew out of a piece of Ohio history that would not leave her alone, the story of Ohio's first female sheriff, who took office after her husband was killed in the line of duty. That spark became The Widows, where Lily Ross steps into the sheriff's job and joins forces with Marvena Whitcomb, a miner's widow and organizer. Montgomery has also said that her family roots in eastern Kentucky helped shape the dialect, food, music, and mountain sensibility of the series.

From there, the Kinship books widened their scope without losing their human center. The Hollows leans into ghost stories, a railroad death, and the shadow of an asylum. The Stills turns to tainted moonshine, Prohibition, and the ways fear can spread through a town in winter. The Echoes brings in a land dispute, a kidnapping, and painful questions about what family really means. Even the short story Downriver shows her interest in memory, guilt, and old secrets that do not stay buried.

Her books care as much about community as crime.

Readers who click with Montgomery usually like the same few things: grounded historical detail, women who refuse to stay in the roles handed to them, and mysteries that never forget class, labor, family, and place. Coal camps, courthouse politics, hollows, farms, and back roads all matter in these stories. So do daily chores, local grudges, and small kindnesses. She is not writing museum-piece history. She is writing about people trying to make decent lives inside messy systems.

That balance between literary life and working life has shaped her career off the page too. Early chapters of The Widows helped earn her an Ohio Arts Council grant and a John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence appointment at Thurber House. She lives in southern Ohio with her husband and their three cats, and she and her husband are the parents of two adult daughters. It sounds like the life of someone who still loves books, still loves work, and still shows up for both.