Author Information
Jim Kelly's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    22 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    December 2003
  • Latest Book:
    March 2025
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About the Author

Jim Kelly was born in Barnet, Herts. On April 1st 1957. He went to Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, and Finchley Grammar School. After spending three years at Sheffield University he spent a year looking for a job, working as a labourer to earn money. In 1979 he finally got a job in newspapers, on the Bedfordshire Times where he spent five years as a local reporter. He has also worked The Yorkshire Evening Press in York, and Fleet Street in London. He started writing novels, the first being ‘The Water Clock’ published in 2001, written on a laptop on the 6.45 out of Kings Cross. Writing at home became Claustrophobic so he got an allotment, and set up a decent shed with heating and windows as the ideal “remote Office”

Full Series List in Order

A Detective Peter Shaw Mystery

1 - Death Wore White (Jun-2009)
2 - Death Watch (May-2010)
3 - Death Toll (Jun-2011)
4 - Death's Door (May-2012)
5 - At Death's Window (Feb-2015)
6 - Death on Demand (Nov-2015)
7 - Death Ship (Dec-2016)

Nighthawk

1 - The Great Darkness (Apr-2018)
2 - The Mathematical Bridge (Feb-2019)
3 - The Night Raids (Feb-2020)

A Philip Dryden Mystery

1 - The Water Clock (Dec-2003)
2 - The Fire Baby (Dec-2004)
3 - The Moon Tunnel (Dec-2005)
4 - The Coldest Blood (Jan-2007)
5 - The Skeleton Man (Jan-2008)
6 - Nightrise (Jan-2013)
7 - The Funeral Owl (Dec-2013)

Book List in Order: 22 titles



  • A mutilated body found frozen in a block of ice. A second body perched high in a cathedral, riding a gargoyle -- hidden for more than thirty years. When forensic evidence links both victims to one crime, reporter Philip Dryden knows he's on to a terr...



  • In the stifling heat wave of June 1976, an American plane crashes on the Cambridgeshire Fens, the point of impact the remote Black Bank Farm. Out of the flames walks a young woman, Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms. Twenty-seven years late...



  • Crawling on elbows and knees, a man slowly inches forward, making his way through a cramped space and suffocating darkness. He doesn't know that someone is watching, and in a flash of light, his journey is over. Now, fifty years later, small-town...



  • A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon he'll be dead -- and life can begin again. Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is ...



  • For seventeen years, the English hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, used only for army training exercises. Before then, the isolated, thousand-year-old community was famous for one thing---having never recorded a single crime. But when local ...



  • Det. Inspector Peter Shaw and veteran officer, Det. Sgt. George Valentine are sent to look for containters of toxic waste that may have been dumped on the Norfolk, English shore. While they are there they find the body of a man in a raft that is wash...



  • Rookie detective Peter Shaw teams up with his father's tough expartner to investigate both a gruesome series of present-day murders and some unfinished business from the past....



  • Bodies are being exhumed at King's Lynn's cemetery, the bones moved to higher ground to avoid flooding. But when the coffin of murdered pub landlady Nora Tilden is hauled up into the light there's a grim discovery; the twisted corpse of a young black...



  • An idyllic island holds a dark secret.... On a hot August day in 1994, 76 holidaymakers travel to an island off the North Norfolk coast. Only 75 return alive--a young man is murdered, the case left unsolved. Twenty years later, using state-of-the-ar...






  • By popular demand, Philip Dryden returns in an intriguing new fenland mystery. Journalist Philip Dryden is shocked to be informed by police that his father has been killed in a car accident -- he drowned during the fenland floods of 1977, 35 years...



  • When a reader contacts local newspaper The Crow to report a rare sighting of the Boreal or so-called 'Funeral' owl, the paper's editor Philip Dryden has a sense of foreboding. For the Funeral Owl is said to be an omen of death. It's already proving t...



  • When a body is discovered beneath the waves off Scolt Head Island, the contents of the dead man’s pockets lead Detective Inspector Peter Shaw to suspect an outbreak of ‘samphire wars’: a turf battle for control of the prized sea asparagus which...



  • When the newspapers turn up to cover Ruby Bright’s 100th birthday, they find her seaside care home is a murder scene. Someone spirited Ruby away by wheelchair down to the water’s edge on the idyllic north Norfolk coast, and strangled her. But why...



  • An explosion on a Norfolk beach leads to far-reaching consequences for detectives Shaw and Valentine. When an explosion rips across Hunstanton Beach on the north Norfolk coast, an abandoned Second World War bomb is assumed to be the cause ... but ...



  • 1939, Cambridge. The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout - The Great Darkness - covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the coo...



  • The story begins with Jim’s introduction to paranormal activities and spirits by becoming involved in current events happening at the local spirit-inhabited “Haunted Hinsdale House.” Shortly after this, Jim was taking some photographs and was a...



  • This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he’s going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he’s told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem t...



  • Cambridge, 1940. It is the first winter of the war, and snow is falling. When an evacuee drowns in the river, his body swept away, Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sets out to investigate what seems to be a deliberate attack. The following night, a lo...



  • Japanese-Americans contributed mightily to the U.S. victory in WWII. One young Nisei may even have saved Doolittle’s Raid from disaster. His story was never told, possibly because it would have exposed how unjust the U.S. Government had been to int...






  • A lone German bomber crosses the east coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long, hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and, following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge's rail yards. The shell falls s...



  • Aisling embarks on a fun filled adventure from London to a remote part of Ireland.Living with her family in England, Aisling, aged 5, really misses her Granny who lives in the west of Ireland. She enjoys visiting for holidays in the summer but is so ...



  • Spring 1941. It is the third year of war, and when the siren sounds the people of Cambridge trudge to the city's six public bomb shelters. Crowded, smoky, often raucous, the shelters have become a way of life for the poor. At dawn the body of a young...


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Jim Kelly has published 22 books.

The next book by Jim Kelly, The Trinity Shelter, will be published in March 2025.

The first book by Jim Kelly, The Water Clock, was published in December 2003.

Yes. Jim Kelly has 3 series.